


Good & Ready

by Nazca_Jazz



Category: Over the Garden Wall (Cartoon)
Genre: Bullying, Explicit Language, F/M, Fluff, Friendship/Love, Infinite Eyerolls, Muteness, OTGW Spoilers, Post-Canon, Sibling Bonding, Sign Language, Slight Graphic Violence, Wirt Poetry, Wirtrice, awkward teens, some dark stuff
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-26
Updated: 2015-01-21
Packaged: 2018-02-27 02:00:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 25,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2674664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nazca_Jazz/pseuds/Nazca_Jazz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Little Mermaid themed AU. Trying to sort out her life, Beatrice ends up making a deal with the Beast who promises he can send her "over the garden wall" to Wirt and Greg. The catch? She has one year to convince Wirt to forget his feelings for Sara and bring him and Greg, willingly, back over the garden wall--all without the use of her voice. And if she can't, she will meet a graver end than just heart-break and turning into sea foam.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. "Meal with the Men in Ascots"

The winter had passed, spring and summer had come and gone, and autumn had set in, nuzzling itself into the land of the Unknown. Leaves from the oak trees, birch trees, and ash trees and most other kinds but the Edelwood had fallen in sprinkled shades of reds, oranges, and yellows. No one had seen the Edelwood trees for many months, not even in the deepest parts of the forest. No one missed those dreadful, grotesquely grown mysteries of nature, and folks thought it was better this way. The trees that did grow in the forest stood firm against the north wind which was, rather uncharacteristically, soft that afternoon. Some of the leaves that had fallen to the earthy floors were swept up and pranced about in the faded blue sky. Most of the leaves, however, stayed in their bunched heaps, just ripe for stomping around on and jumping into.

Beatrice found herself smiling at her young brothers and sisters who were outside, doing just that. She imagined Greg out there with them, prattling about rock facts and rolling about in the windblown leaves, mud collecting on his trousers and sticks weaving themselves into his little locks. He and her siblings would have gotten along famously.

All children seemed to go through a stage when they believed they were indestructible—belief that the world was really, very simple and straightforward and that they could not be taken down by concepts like mortality. Wirt probably tried to talk this common sense into his brother before, but as far as Beatrice could tell, he’d given up. Wirt let his brother understand the world in his unique perception, though that may have been due to the stress that seemed to consume Wirt at a constant rate. In any case, if Greg would have been outside helping the way he believed he was, Wirt would have been raking with the older children. He’d mumble those weird verses of poetry under his breath as the younger children would race circles around him, pulling at his cape and further soaking themselves in grim and decomposing leaves.

 _No_ , Beatrice snapped harshly at herself. _Not this nonsense again_. She stood up suddenly from her seat by the window, causing the chair to squeal unnecessarily against the uneven floorboards. She left her sewing on the window ledge and peeked into the kitchen. Her mother was still there, preparing the festive dinner and whistling softly to herself.

Beatrice had heard the song before. Her mother claimed to have learned it from the wind in the trees during their time as birds. An ancient tune that the forest had carried for eons, the song was like a souvenir from a strange dream. But it hadn’t been a dream, Beatrice knew well. After all, there were constant reminders everywhere—like her younger siblings and their refusal to wear shoes, how they curled their toes when they horsing around and pushing each other. It was traces of that instinct to grip with their feet, to use their claws and dig into the ground or around a branch to find stability, security, and safety. Sometimes she noticed her father shiver, and how he would shake in a wave of tremors from head to toe, as if resettling invisible feathers. It was these small things that brought both small pleasures and torment simultaneously.

Beatrice had vowed to forget the two tender-hearted friends she had met in the woods as a bird. But like the traces of having done “bird-time” in her family, she found traces of the brothers everywhere as well. There was no escaping them. Reminders shadowed her all across the forest, in the towns, on the roads, in the sleet and snow, in the vegetables she cut for dinner. Her memories would not let them fade into the back of her mind and stay silent. At first, she had tried to deny they existed in the first place. That hadn’t worked for long, as her mother pestered Beatrice for the mysteriously determined boy’s identity, his relation to her, why she had left Wirt in her mother’s care. Soon she was eaten away by anger, seething and calling them foul names, enraged that they had not stayed longer, enraged that Wirt had not tried to convince her harder, enraged that they had left her anyways.

She was being selfish, she realized. Wirt and Greg were home, among the people who loved them and where they belonged. Their home and lives had different challenges they would confront and different rules to abide by. No life was an easy path through the woods, everyone had obstacles to face. Wirt and Greg had faced many with her, but now it was time the brothers faced new challenges alone, and it was time she did as well.

“Go on and get ready, dear.” Beatrice’s mother said without turning around. “They’ll be here soon.”

“Don’t you have any dirt for me to taste?” Beatrice teased, standing at her usual post beside her mother. She had grown fond of the bird gags her family told. It was one big inside joke that no one else understood, and that made Beatrice feel whole. Dropping her tone, she said more sincerely, “Oh mom, can’t I help with _something_? Maybe I’ll go check on the stew? Should I prepare the—” Her mother hit her hand with a wooden spoon. Beatrice recoiled, rubbing the spot with an annoyed grimace.

“The only thing you can help with is putting on that dress and ruffling your feathers in way that is presentable.” The woman chirped.

“But mom…”

“No,” her mother pressed. “Now shoo! I will not have my daughter slaving away in the kitchen before such an important evening.” She stopped to wipe her hands on a rag.

“Please mom, I want to talk about this,” Beatrice pursued gently. She realized this was somewhat out of character for her, but her mother was much more sensitive about the topic at hand than Beatrice and she didn’t want to upset her by using the wrong tone of voice. “I’m ready to leave the family, but to a man I’ve never met before? I don’t know about this. Can’t it wait a little longer?”

There was a small moment of silence before her mother strategically whipped out an onion and began to peel it. “You’ll be fine, Beatrice. Leaving the nest to make another nest is the nature of all living creatures. The natural order. I’ve seen other animals do it, and I did it when I was your age. Your father and I are very happy together. You have nothing to worry about.” Her mother put the knife down and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Besides, you look ethereal in that dress. Have you worked on your fan signals? I’ve left a fan for you on my table.” She sighed. “Oh, Beatrice, only a man blind _and_ stupid would turn you away.”

 _That’s not quite what I’m worried about_ , Beatrice thought, but kept to herself. “Thank you.” She gave her mother a nervous smile, not that she would have seen with her back turned, and climbed the stairs solidly. Each foot felt heavier than the next time she lifted it, having come to a complete stop by the time she reached her shared bedroom with her three sisters. There, on the small wardrobe, was the dress her mother had finished sewing just the night before, laid out carefully without a misplaced wrinkle or crease.    

Beatrice had personally sewn the pieces of delicate fabric together herself, but her mother had insisted on doing the embellishments with silver thread. Besides, Beatrice had never been very talented with needlework. It had taken her mother nearly three weeks of continuous effort to finish the curling, vine-like patterns around the bottom of the skirt, the hem of her sleeves, and the neck and waistlines. During that whole time, Beatrice had rigorously overseen her mother’s work in case she went and over-embellished (such as adding bows or beads or lace and ruffles) in attempts to beautify an already wonderful masterpiece with money they did not have to spend materials on. In any case, the dress was breath-taking. She would have worn it just to display her modest mother’s skills and the labour of love.

Beatrice snapped out of her nervous trance, stepping into the room and lifting the blue gown by the shoulders. _Right_ , she thought. _I can do this._

 

<oOo>

 

A little while later, the door opened and the sound of many heavy boots stomping through the entrance and laughter flooded the mill. Beatrice swallowed hard, hidden in the shadows of the stairwell while her siblings had stopped in their murmurs to stare at the guests. She heard her father’s voice first, calling to her mother with joy ringing in his words. There were more sounds of shuffling shoes against the worn wooden floor, and her mother’s muffled exclamations caused Beatrice to reach out for the handrail. _I’ve faced vegetable-dressed skeletons, a yarn witch, and the nightmare of the forest known as the Beast_. She could face this, there was no need to cower, no reason to flee. She was in no danger. Beatrice’s grip loosened and she let her hand on the rail lead her down the creaky staircase.

“What handsome company we’re in this evening!” She heard her mother say. “Let me just tell you how impressed John and I were by Harold’s letters. You, young man, have very refined writing. What did you say your occupation was again?”

Beatrice squinted a little as she entered the lit room, scanning the place until she spotted the two strangers who were unbuttoning their thick wool coats. The way their clothes were crisply sewn, the golden buttons, the sharp newness of their sleeves and collars—they were very wealthy, anyone would be able to tell. Their shoes shined even in the shadows of their trousers (a plus for the ladies), their ascots coloured purple and blue, hair combed back slickly and white gloves on each hand. Both were roughly the same height and were the spitting images of each other. The one in blue looked like a decade or so older but overall quite well-aged, and the younger in the purple, with his clean-shaven face, seemed to be in his twenties.

“Without further ado, I would like to introduce my daughter,” her father grinned, turning to the staircase where Beatrice stood all dolled up in the dress she and her mother had made together, hiding the bottom half of her face with the antique fan her mother had given her for the occasion. The young one in the purple blinked at her with an expression she could not quite decide was more astonishment or confusion. The blue-ascotted man smiled at her and beckoned her closer. Beatrice walked across the floorboards as delicately and gracefully as she could manage, feeling unnerved as the one in purple continued to stare at her. Luckily he had the self-control to stop his jaw from dropping.

“Enchanté,” the one in blue said humorously, kissing her knuckles. “I’m Douglas Turner, a friend of your father’s. This here is Harold, my nephew. You two have been exchanging letters, and I would like to praise you for your intellectual writing. Quite the diplomat! Isn’t that so, Harold?”

Harold, who had finally seemed to be conscious of his surroundings, snapped out of the distressing daze and cleared his throat. “Harold Douglas—erm _Turner_ , Harold Turner. Pleasure to finally meet your acquaintance,” he stooped to kiss the back of her hand. Beatrice found the gesture to be alarmingly long, and nearly pulled her hand away. _Don’t mess up, don’t mess up_ , Beatrice chanted to herself, hiding her frown behind the fan.

“Pleasure,” said Beatrice as clearly as possible.

He let go of her hand, and she resisted the temptation of hiding it behind her or going to wipe it on her dress. She may have been pretending that her first impression of Harold did not bother her, but Beatrice was not dense. She could tell that he wasn’t someone she could possibly get along with, let alone get engaged or married to. Honestly, the guy annoyed her in a way that neither Wirt nor Greg ever had (of whom she at first found to be quite annoying). He was too forward in all the opposite directions. At dinner, he tried to engage her in conversations she did not care for (“Have you heard of the Assembled Men’s Club? My father created the organization, and since he’s been sick, I’ve been leading the regular fox hunts every Saturday.” “That’s nice.”) He would ask her all the questions she did not know how to answer (“Have you been following the witch spottings?” “Not particularly.”), and he rambled about all the things she didn’t understand (“I believe the blacks ought to stay in their place, all that anti-slavery nonsense is heathen.”) nor agreed with.

Harold adored her physical features, that she could tell. She had done up her hair and left a few curled strands to frame her face, rouged her cheeks and lips—as per tradition. He complimented her beauty and straightforwardness, and she did believe he was being sincere, but frankly, his compliments just didn’t mean very much to her.

Though bluntness started arguments, on the whole, Beatrice appreciated words a lot more when they stumbled out of the mouth naturally—genuine artifacts said unconsciously without forgery that summed up the parts of a person that made them, well, _them_. Though this was a presentation dinner, Beatrice still found that the “thick-layer-of-flattery” requirement filled her with repulsion.   

The moon had hoisted itself high in the sky by the time their company had to part. Harold stopped once again to kiss her hand before he left, taking an even longer time than the last. “Until we meet again,” he said.

Beatrice replied, “I pray that will not be too long.”

_Just get in your carriage already._

He tipped his hat and entered the carriage that had brought him to the mill. Beatrice watched from the window as they drove off into the forest before balling her fists and wiping them furiously on the window curtains.

“Heavens, what madness have you caught now?” Her mother pulled the curtains out of her hand.

“He’s sleazy, mom!” She erupted. “Didn’t you see the way he was looking at me? He wanted to ravish me on the spot!”

“Beatrice!” Her mother reprimanded. “Not in front of your brothers and sisters!”

“They all saw it, why not give them the word too?” She slumped against the wall. Now that the guests had gone, the children resumed their chaotic playing and were running in and out of the room. Her father was elsewhere, probably in the living room reading. “Just because he has money and he knows he’s good-looking, he thinks he can win a girl with that empty jug of a brain he has. Absolutely horrid.”

Her mother shook her head. “You can’t judge a man in one night.”

“ _Ooh_ ,” Beatrice acknowledged with mocking agreement as she cleared up the dishes from the table “I see, so you _can’t_ judge a man of all his characteristics in one night, but you _can_ marry off a daughter to one in less than that time. Makes sense!”

“Now see here, I never said that!” Her mother snapped, putting out the light of the fancy candles and lighting up the regular ones. “No one said you were marrying him tonight.”

“Might as well have,” Beatrice retorted. “I’m not going through suitors. You’ve all made up your minds, haven’t you?”

“Don’t speak to me in that tone of voice, young lady.” Her mother took the dishes out of Beatrice’s hands and put them in the kitchen’s wooden basin, preparing to wash them.

“But you won’t change your mind, will you?”

Her mother sighed. “What is it that you want, Beatrice?”

“I don’t know,” Beatrice grasped handfuls of her dress. “I just—I can’t stand being here anymore.”

A silence fell over them for a small moment. “Here?” Her mother said in a small voice. “With us?” The clinking of the dishes in the wooden basin was soundless. “With me?”

“No, _no!_ ” She panicked. “Of course not. I want nothing more than to live with you—with father, with Eddie, Fern, and Sam and the others. I missed you all so much.”

“Then I don’t understand,” the clinking resumed.

“It’s just that,” Beatrice sighed. “I used to think this mill kept me safe, but now it feels like a prison. I want to go out and… and travel. You have no idea what sorts of things I saw when I was a bird, the kinds of things I encountered. Even though I was trapped in a bird body, I felt freer than ever before.” Her hands ringed together, a position of weakness that only her mother had ever seen. “I suppose what I’m saying is… I need to go away for a little while.”

Her mother shook her head. “Oh, I _do_ have an inkling of an idea, Beatrice. This is about that boy you left in my care when we were birds. Is he the reason why you can’t marry Harold?”

“What?” Beatrice blinked. “No!” She thought some more, finding it suddenly difficult to express herself. “Well, okay, I traveled with him and his brother Greg for a little while. They helped me out a couple of times, and I owed them favours, so I was helping them get home. I suppose I miss that exploration and the sense of purpose. They needed to go home to their family and it reminded me… well, of us.”

“And Harold?” Her mother raised an eyebrow at her.

“He’s a jerk, mom,” Beatrice insisted. “I don’t want to marry him because _I don’t want to marry him_.”

Her mother scrubbed the dishes for some minutes without a word as Beatrice stood by the door, waiting for an answer. Her mother couldn’t stay quiet forever. But after perhaps thirty minutes, when the dishes were nearly all cleaned and Beatrice’s legs and feet were getting a little sore, she heaved a heavy sigh and figured she ought to at least change out of her dress.

“No.”

Beatrice stopped and re-entered the kitchen. “Sorry, what was that?”

Her mother turned to face her, standing up stiffly and wiping her hands on a rag. “I said ‘no’.”

A tumble of emotions burst in her chest as Beatrice fought to regain calmer, more sensible words. “But why—?”

“Because we need the money, Beatrice.” The frankness of the statement slapped her across the face. There, the truth was finally out in the open. She had never been sure who she got her stubborn directness from, but it certainly felt like it was maternal at the moment.

“I don’t,” Beatrice hesitated, feeling like a small child and unexpectedly foolish. “I don’t want to.”

“So you’re going to run away again?” Her mother propped her hands on her waist. “Like last time? _Hm_ , maybe you should throw a stone at a flock of chickens next time around. That ought to curse and transform us into the type of people we really are.”

“ _Mother!_ ” Her own voice sounded as wounded as she felt, ashamed and regretful as she would never stop feeling. Her hands feeling clammy, painfully clasped together. She backed away slowly, shaking her head furiously as if she could shake the words out of her head. “Don’t say that. _Please_ don’t.”

“I’ve eaten real dirt, Beatrice!” Her mother lashed. “I’ve had to feed my _children_ real dirt. And I never want to do that again, as a human or a non-human— _never_ again.”

“Stop!” She yelled. Her heart felt like it was bleeding, open for anyone to see and cut at further. She hated that feeling, but hated herself for wanting to flee even more.

“I don't make the rules,” her mother said, a voice close to tears coming from behind her lips, “It's your duty.”

“ _Stop it!_ ”

Beatrice ran from the kitchen, up the stairs into her room where she ripped the dress off and banged her fists against the wall in a fit of rage. Some minutes passed and she calmed down, nursing her bruised hands and ducking her head between her knees. She didn’t want to remember, not about that day. The day she had received her first suitor. The dinner had gone just like the one that evening, only she had been hostile and unpleasant, cynical and uncaring and her actions had cost them. It was the reason why her family needed money more than ever now. Beatrice had run into the woods, disappointed and bitter with her dog following behind. She’d seen the bluebird, spiraling up into the sky, and jealousy took hold of her heart. Birds and their wings, they could go anywhere they pleased, procreate under less complicated restrictions. Damn those birds. Before she knew it, she was chucking a rock into the sky. The stone arched beautifully from behind, twirling in the air until it aligned with the creature and struck it on the head. And the rest was history.

Beatrice leaned against the wall, pressing her side against the dull, flat surface and rubbing a thumb over the nails that poked out of the corners where floorboards and wall met. _If only I was a pushover._

 

<oOo>

 

She was shaken awake by her father, a lantern hanging from his arm, and a pack in the other hand. “Get some clothes together. I’ve put some money in a pocket, don’t lose it.”

“Dad?” She rubbed her eyes. “What… what’re you doing?”

“Helping you, dovehouse.” He opened the bag and showed her a few things he had packed for her. There was a canteen made from dark leather, a week’s worth of food rations, a moth-bitten wool coat, candles, a little bottle of oil, and more. Beatrice glanced around the room. Her sisters were sleeping soundly in the beds next to hers. She slipped out of the covers and tip-toed to her wardrobe, throwing in couple of under garments and autumn dresses in. When she had finished, she shrugged into the wool coat and headed down the stairs, cringing every time a stair creaked. Her father was waiting for her at the bottom, wrapping the oil lamp handle with a handkerchief and handed it to her after she had done up her boot laces. “Make sure you head straight to Maisie’s Inn and get your needed rest there before heading off in the morning. If you're hungry, put it on my tab and I’ll pay for it later.”

“Why are you doing this?” Beatrice blurted out, the sleepy haze that she had been encapsulated in had faded, and with its disappearance, common sense had taken hold.

“Because we need money,” her father said, “But I need you to be happy more.”

His smile was gentle and heart-warming, sincerity that she had never before seen in him. He must have overheard the argument with her mother, and it struck her as unusual that he hadn’t taken her mother’s side in all this. Society looked down on women who wanted to masculinize themselves, to depend on their own skills rather than wait for men to give them permission. Why was he letting her go?

“I don’t think turning into birds was a coincidence." He admitted. "At least, not for you. I feel a little of what you feel, that package of purpose and freedom together simultaneously.”

“It’s,” she felt bashful suddenly. She had never spoken about these kinds of things with her father before. “It’s not just that. I need to sort out my… my feelings. Find closure.”

“Do what you must,” her father grinned bitter-sweetly at her, a glimmer of pride in his voice. He reached out and patted her hand firmly. “You have more bird in you than any of us.”

She shook her head, giggling softly. “Thanks dad,” she hugged him fiercely, holding him and counting to ten like she used to when she was little. Back when his hands could envelope hers like a clam around its pearl. “I’ll come back.”

“Oh, my little girl, of course,” He mumbled into her hair. “You always do.”

Taking the lamp, she pecked him on the cheek and set out, refusing to look back even as she entered the forest. Looking back meant she had second thoughts, that she was doing something wrong. She would come back when she was ready, when she had proven capable of taking on her responsibilities without regretting anything. Beatrice exhaled sharply as a cold wind passed through the naked trees and the trunks shivered and creaked in an orchestral harmony.

_I can do this._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey all! Firstly, thank you so much for taking the time to read this!
> 
> I came across this prompt on tumblr, and then one thing led to another, and then I wrote it. I plan for this fic to be about 10 chapters (more or less), because I will be touching on a lot of loose ends and developing them (Wirt and Greg's parents, school, the Beast and his origins, etc.) with my take on them, but the number of chapters may change depending on if 10 is overestimated or underestimated. And not to worry, there will be fluff and stuff! (Some awkward, some not so awkward.)
> 
> I also hope to add pictures/visuals/art as the blessed rules of ao3 allows this and I plan to take full advantage of the privilege.
> 
> Anyways, read & review, or leave with a smile. It makes us better writers.


	2. "The Wanderer Behind the Garden Wall"

_Her hands are the universe,_

_encapsulating the stars, fingers dust_

_the spaces of nothing with_

_glimmers of touch._

 

Wirt stared at the verse he had just written, chewing on the back of his pen. His poetry had improved over the last few months. Ever since Greg’s dad had found out about his stepson’s secret passion for literary arts, he’d been supporting him near fanatically. He encouraged Wirt to take Writer’s Craft classes and sign up for poetry contests, ordered William Wordsworth, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickens, and Edgar Allen Poe anthologies off Amazon. He even managed to persuade Wirt to attend conversation language classes held free of charge at the library like Spanish and French, and even ASL. At first, Wirt was embarrassed beyond words. He could do nothing but accept the books, sign up for the contests, and take the classes (once a pushover, always a pushover). Over time, however, he actually began to enjoy himself. The Writer’s Craft class… didn’t bore him to death, unexpectedly. The teacher was engaging and though there were people in the class who had obviously taken the course because they thought it was an easy credit, he wasn’t the only one who genuinely wanted to learn how to write. He never won anything in the contests, but he got an honorable mention once. The moment his family found out, his mother went to the grocery store and bought a fruit cake and aligned candles so it read “Poet Pride!”

Free verse was still his favorite format of poetry, but rhyme schemes and meters served as really great challenges for his writing. The only con about all this was that, because he felt he had improved, he cringed every time he looked back at his old work. Sometimes he was tempted to remove his old poetry journals that he normally placed on his desk and hide them in the dark, remote places of his desk drawers—other times he thought it might be better to pile them under a couple of logs and just set the whole thing on fire. Only, if he did that, he’d upset Greg who insisted time and time again that, though he never really understood his brother’s poetry, he liked Wirt’s poems. Yes, even the cheesy-deepest ones.

Wirt squinted at the page. Something still felt off about this verse, he wasn’t entirely sure what, but definitely _something_. The stars bit was cliché imagery, sure, but surprisingly it wasn’t that. Wirt started from the top, letting the words graze his lips as he went through the piece inaudibly. Now that he thought about it, the entire poem felt a little vague, even though Wirt knew who the main subject of the poem was. So why did it feel like it was written for someone else?

Wirt sighed and set the paper aside, pushing himself from the table and letting the chair roll him halfway across his room. Evenings after dinner were meant for free-writing, he could edit in the morning. He wasn’t supposed to _think_ , he was supposed to _write_. Just then, the door flew open and Greg, carrying Jason Funderberker the Frog, announced loudly, “Jason Funderberker and me are going ghost whispering!”

“’And I’,” Wirt corrected absentmindedly, spinning around in his chair. What was that supposed to mean? A poem that didn’t feel like it was intended for the person he was writing it for? Was he distracted? He turned to glare at Greg who had started to shake the frog energetically, a soft jingling coming from the creature’s belly. The glare was a failed attempt, as Wirt was soon betrayed by his stifled laughter that came out as snorts. Who knew frogs could make such tortured expressions? “Yeah? What kind of evil spirit are you expelling today?”

“Young Man Daniels said her attic is full of squirrels that keep her up at night,” Greg patted his frog. “Jason Funderberker and me are going to prove it’s a ghost.”

“’And _I_ ’”, said Wirt. He dragged himself back to his desk, subconsciously rejecting the idea of getting out of his chair because of comfort reasons. He picked through the textbooks on the shelf above his laptop, selecting tenth grade math, chemistry, and his Writer’s Craft book and stuffed them in his backpack. Sometimes he spent so long editing his poems in the morning that he hardly had time for breakfast, let alone preparing himself for the day. Editing took up a lot of his time without his realization—that or clarinet, which his mother had banned him from practicing earlier than noon. Six o’clock rehearsals in his room were not appreciated, especially since his mother was not a morning person. At all.

Wirt glanced at the page he’d been working on. The issue still remained protruding like a thorn in his side. This was going to bother him all night, wasn’t it? He picked up his backpack and brought it to his bedpost.

“Do you wan’na come?”

“Hm?” Wirt glanced over his shoulder, blinking at his brother. “What? Ghost whispering?” In the past, Wirt had entertained his brother with ghost whispering and ghost hunting, anything to keep Greg from missing the world they had returned from. The first few months after they had left the hospital and tried to settle back into their lives were the hardest. Greg wouldn’t stop talking about the land of the Unknown and made frequent references to the people and events that they’d met and experienced to the point that it hurt. Once, he even caught Greg trying to scale the garden wall with his short legs and baby-soft hands bruising on the old bricks. Wirt berated him, telling him that the Unknown never existed in the first place, that it had all been a dream and there was no going back. Of course, his brother didn’t believe him for one second. Auntie Whispers’ bell remained the only true, and convincing evidence that the whole ordeal could not have been _just a dream_. Wirt knew that. He knew that something, if not everything of the Unknown, existed. But to return, even to visit, was impossible to recreate as it seemed to involve getting knocked unconscious and falling into a lake. He and Greg nearly killed themselves that way and Wirt swore to himself that the only way Greg would come in harm’s way was over his own limp, cold, dead body.

Everyone else thought that the brothers’ behaviors were a result of their small concussions. They went along with Wirt’s idea of ghost whispering and ghost hunting to “help Greg and Wirt’s transition” back to being “normal”. And it had worked for the most part. It kept Greg busy, who easily believed that work needed to be done around town before he could return to the Unknown. Wirt on the other hand was not as easily distracted. He had nightmares for the first few months after returning home. Sometimes, he woke in the middle of the night, searching for Greg in a wild, cold-sweat frenzy that was only tamable when he found his brother sleeping soundly in the room over, then sat at the foot of his bed until morning. He suffered from a lack of sleep, had difficulty eating, and was haunted by reminders of the Unknown everywhere. He could no longer look at pumpkins the same way, and freshly fallen snow pained him, hiking trips through the forest made him anxious, and the dark winter months frightened him. His mom and Greg’s dad helped in every way they could, sometimes using vacation days from work so they could spend time with him during the times he didn’t know if he could lead a normal life and go to school. Gradually, the long winter days got warmer, and his nightmares began to lose their power over him. The reminders became just distant memories by the time spring started to slip away, and life grew to be more important. Summer arrived and his major concerns returned to _should I join the marching band next year?_ And _I still haven’t asked Sara out yet. Why haven’t I asked her yet?_

“Nah, I think I’ll sit this one out.” Greg had remained relatively the same, and missed the Unknown but didn’t seem to suffer from his memories of it. Instead, those memories fueled him. Wirt knew that Greg’s “Potatoes and Molasses” song was only a daily farce of trying to get on Wirt’s nerves, especially ever since he had put the whole adventure on the backburner to focus on high school. Greg was determined to get a reaction out of him.

“Is ‘she’ Beatrice?”

“ _Oh my God_ ,” he leapt across the room in a heart beat, swiping the paper out of Greg’s offending eyes and prayed that he hadn’t read the whole thing.

“Why are you hiding it?” Greg gave a slight pout. “You’re always coming up with stuff out loud. You can trust me! I won’t tell anyone.” He glanced at Funderberker then slowly, cautious so as not to alarm the amphibian, covered the sides of the frog’s head with his hands. The frog’s face stayed a façade of dispassionate ‘I-couldn’t-possibly-give-a-croak’. “Okay, now it’s safe.”

“No, because it’s— _because_ , okay? A-and what do you mean _Beatrice_? It’s for Sara. Can’t you tell?”

Greg cocked his head thoughtfully, as if reconsidering the possibility. “No.”

“Ugghh—all right, _all right_ ,” Wirt surrendered. “You should go before Mom’s eighty percent more likely to say ‘no’ about you leaving the house. But _please_ —no, just… forget about the poem. Yeah, you know what? It doesn’t exist anymore.”

Greg stared at him blankly. “Yes it does. It’s right there on the table.”

“No—no, _actually_ , it doesn’t. Uh, look, I’m taking it, and see this drawer?” Wirt opened the bottom drawer of his desk. It was small and squeaked a little as the old wood slid on old wood. “This is the _Nothing Drawer_. Anything that I put in there doesn’t exist anymore.”

Greg peered around his brother as Wirt stuffed the poem into the compartment. “Wow, that’s a lot of poems that don’t exist, Wirt.”

“W-what—stop! Look, back off a bit. They don’t exist! Right? Okay, weren’t—weren’t we going somewhere? Uh, ghost… whispering?”

A half-milk-teeth and half-adult-teeth grin broke across Greg’s face. “Really? You’re coming?”

Wirt let out a small sigh. He couldn’t help but smile at the overenthusiastic seven-year-old. “Yeah… brother o’ mine. Yeah, I am.”

Greg jumped up and down, the bell in Jason Funderberker’s stomach ringing along. “Awesomesauce!”

 

<oOo>

 

After two hours with a broom, a chimney poker, two pairs of rubber gloves, an outdoor ladder, a skipping rope tied to a stick, and five bags of peanuts, Wirt and Greg had championed the worst way of chasing a family of seven squirrels out of a suburban house attic. It didn’t help that Greg wouldn’t stop shaking Jason Funderberker, so in addition to being absolutely exhausted and developing a small phobia of park critters, Wirt left the senior woman’s house with a high-pitch ringing in his ears as they started their walk home.

“No ghost again!” Greg shook his head. The frog was perched comfortably on Greg’s kettle.

“Yeah, I think one bit me, but I’m probably just being paranoid.” Wirt laughed nervously, then shivered. “Oh man, I really hope I’m just being paranoid.”

“Don’t worry, Wirt!” Greg put a hand over his heart. “I solemnly promise I’ll stop looking for ghosts and look for a cure instead if you get a deadly disease—oh hey, there’s Sara!”

Wirt halted in his tracks as they came to the graveyard where Sara was walking down the sidewalk opposite of the street, earbuds in place and hands deep in her varsity jacket pockets.

“Oh crap,” Wirt said under his breath.

“What’s wrong? Aren’t you really good friends now— _whoa_!” Wirt yanked his brother by the back of his overalls into the bushes by the curb. It was too late though, he’d seen the look of recognition in Sara’s eyes. He should have known this wouldn’t work by now and by the number of times he’d tried it. His whole hiding tactic was honestly more instinctual than anything these days.

“Wirt! And Greg… hey? What are you two _doing_?”

“Ghost hunting!” Greg exclaimed. Jason croaked.

“Yeah, _yeah_ that’s… exactly what we were doing.” Wirt cleared his throat and stood up. Greg grabbed onto Wirt’s sweater sleeve and Wirt pulled him out, picking the leaves out of his brother’s hair and fixing the frog and kettle back on his head. “Uh, what are _you_ doing?”

“I’m walking back from Samantha’s. I don’t really like staying at my own place when no one’s home, you know?” She coiled the earbud wires around her phone and stuffed it in her pocket. A pregnant, awkward pause followed in which Sara seemed to try and find something to talk about and Wirt silently promised that he would not let himself word vomit. “So… you two goin’ to the graveyard for your ghost hunting?”

Greg’s eyes lit up. “Yeah!” He responded immediately before Wirt could even say anything. Wirt felt unsafe entering the area, as if the Unknown could magically lodge itself back in his mind, erasing nearly a year’s worth of hard work of ignoring and trying to forget. He couldn’t risk that, not after all he’d been through. He had to keep Greg away from that place. He could hurt himself or try something incalculably idiotic such as try to climb back over the garden wall. Why couldn’t Greg understand that the world wasn’t as simple as he thought?

“No,” Wirt said. “I-I don’t think that’s such a great idea.”

“Aw, come on, Wirt!” Greg begged. Even the frog looked at Greg sympathetically. His brother reached into his pants pockets and produced a purple lollipop—the kind they gave to little kids at the doctor’s clinic after a check-up. Greg waved it in front of Wirt’s face, putting on a voice that mimicked infomercials. “Unlike the five dollar price like those schmucks offer at the candy store, you can get this amazing offer for, not _four dollars_ , not _three_ , but absolutely _free of charge_! Where could you find a better deal than _this_? All you’ve got’ta do is call now to the graveyard at five-five-five… five-five-five-not-a-real-number dot com!”

“I don’t want a lollipop, Greg,” Wirt deadpanned.

“I don’t know, it’s a pretty good offer,” Sara laughed. “Especially since candy is getting a little expensive around this time of year.”

“Almost Halloween, huh?” Wirt attempted at small talk, rubbing his forearm. He’d gotten better at talking to her over the course of the year. Before the Unknown ordeal, he’d been more so “acquaintances” than friends with her. He first spoke to her in ninth grade English class when she didn’t understand some of the language in Romeo and Juliet. She had been one of the worst Shakespeare readers he’d ever heard, but she had been clearly spending effort to understand through context and refused to look it up on Sparknotes like everyone else in the class. Wirt had found himself drawn to her determination to tackle the play, and ended up giving her hints so she could figure out the big picture for herself. She lit up when she finally understood a scene, and he began to look forward to her success. The fondness had then turned into platonic liking, and then it seemed, before he knew it, the liking had developed into a full-blown, awkward crush. He began to sweat and stammer and run and hide when he couldn’t think of what to say. He wrote sappy poetry to vent all the clutter in his brain and even went to the second-hand store and bought a cassette player and tapes to record with. In essence, it had been a disaster, but at least he had been a natural, puberty-instilled disaster.

After Wirt had woken up in the hospital, their relationship had seemingly backpedaled. Though there were periods of time where Wirt felt quite well, almost normal, there were also periods where he’d lapse into a state of panic. He would walk through the school halls with a cloud of gloom hanging over his head, or he would be extremely wary and cautious of himself and others, jumping at the slightest things or glaring at random people. Wirt had become an unnatural, insane disaster, talking about skeletons in vegetables, animals in clothes who went to school, rich tea company-owners who got lost in the labyrinth of their own homes, and a horned-beast who could rot your body into the most monstrous-looking trees.

The worst thing of all had happened in December, just before the winter holidays. Jason Funderberker the human had asked Sara out. And she had said yes.

They broke up soon after returning from their holidays, but it had happened and the fact that it had happened _at all_ bothered Wirt to the very depths of annoyance and hatred. Jason texted her constantly, and depending on her mood, Sara still considered him to be “okay” enough to remain on friendly terms. Other times, she’d be too frustrated to even bother replying.

Sara knew about the Unknown, at least, from the bits and pieces Wirt allowed himself to tell her when she asked. She knew he didn’t like discussing his misadventures, so she didn’t ask often. Most of what she knew came from Greg, who felt that everyone—be it an animal or the mailman or the neighbours—were entitled to know everything about the Unknown. Whether Sara believed him and Greg was an entirely different matter, but Wirt was just grateful that she hadn’t bolted and promised to never look at him again.

“You guys should go,” Sara encouraged. “You have to face your fears sometime, right?”

A lot of the time, Wirt found that he couldn’t fight her logic either. It reminded him of Beatrice, except she had figured out what a pushover he was faster than anyone he knew. Plus, she exploited that knowledge. Wirt swallowed hard. “Right.”

They made their way through the graveyard, walking around tombstones and making their way to the garden wall which stood tall, solid, ancient and cracked, and grey as ever. It could pass for any regular, old garden wall if Wirt didn’t hold such awful associations with it.

“Now what?” He mumbled.

“Now we wait for ghosts,” Sara laughed.

Just then, a peculiar smacking sound came from the wall. Wirt and Sara both jumped back, startled by the coincidence. Greg quickly scooped Jason Funderberker off his kettle hat and shook him. The wind eerily stopped blowing through the trees in the graveyard as the bell rang crystal clear in the crisp autumn evening.

Wirt shushed his brother frantically and took the frog away from him. The sound came again, louder, faster, and more desperate than the last.

Someone was smacking the stone wall from the other side.

“Guys,” Wirt could barely say anything above a whisper. “Tell me… tell me you hear that too.”

Greg had a totally opposite reaction. He put his ear to the wall and said loudly, “Wow! Wirt, you’re right!”

A million questions ran through his head for a split second. Thoughts of fleeing, and thoughts about police, and train hoppers, and refugees, but all those paled in comparison to Wirt's worst case scenario. What if someone— _something_ —had followed them out of the Unknown? Wirt felt as though his heart had stopped. What if it was the…

_No_ , Wirt thought. _The Woodsman killed him. That’s impossible._

“St-stay here, okay? I’m going to take a look.”

“Don’t die!” Sara called.

Wirt grabbed hold of the vines and found the nooks in the brick wall that served as footholds. The strangely long, and dreadful up climb felt nostalgic in a way. The footholds and the vines must have changed because nature didn’t repeat itself completely so the vines must have re-grown anew and erosion would have changed the footholds a little. Still, something about climbing the wall didn’t frighten Wirt as much as he thought it would.

“What do you see?” Greg called up, shaking his frog furiously. “Is it a ghost?”

Wirt rolled his eyes at Greg before pulling himself up on the wall and peering over the thick, long bricks. Frankly, Wirt had expected to find nothing—maybe a raccoon or a skunk if fate was feeling generous and didn’t want him to look like a complete lunatic. What he wasn’t expecting, however, was what he saw. Wirt felt as though someone had punched him in the stomach and had completely knocked the wind out of him.

There, by the side of the wall, was a girl in a thick winter coat covered in mud and wet leaves, panting hard and weakly hitting the side of the wall with her palms. At the sound of Wirt’s gasp, she looked up and, in that moment, Wirt felt his heart drop into his gut. No freckled smile had ever looked more familiar in his life.

_Beatrice_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, sorry for the late update! Originally, this chapter was about five to six thousand words long, and it was supposed to be called "A Deal in the Dark", but because Beatrice and the Beast's scene was so long and wordy and overall complex, I had to cut it and save it for the next chapter. So, yes, spoiler alert! The next chapter is where things go down.  
> I'll try to stay as consistent as possible as far as updates go, but I have university finals in a week, so next week's update may be late as well. Apologies!  
> I can not stress how absolutely THRILLED I am to know so many people are excited that I picked up this prompt. All you readers and supporters are absolutely wonderful, and I hope you enjoy reading this chapter as much as I enjoyed writing it. (Sibling bonds are just the bee's knees!)  
> I would also like to mention that I promised art in this fanfic, but until my university finals are over, I will not be able to post anything but the chapters themselves. (There might be some doodles and sketches on my tumblr though, so feel free to wander over to my profile for a link.) Thank you for your patience!  
> Read & review, or leave with a smile. It makes us better writers.


	3. "A Deal in the Dark"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I decided to put the Endnotes at the beginning this time because I have a confession to make about the non-graphic violence tag: I lied. There is some graphic violence in this chapter that, when first planning this fic, I thought I could avoid but what with my more detailed planning for the future chapters, I realized there was no way around it. I apologize profusely for anyone who can not bring themselves to finish the end of this chapter. Please do not feel obligated to finish it because “you would miss something important”. You are not missing out. This is the chapter where the Beast takes Beatrice’s voice away and sends her off on her merry way "over the garden wall". With that knowledge, you are now golden. And for those of you who like dark, slightly twisted violence, then today’s your lucky day. 
> 
> In other news, I have one more week of finals and updates will resume back to Wednesdays! I am also thinking of doing ask-prompts/drabbles/ficlets in which you may wander over to my tumblr and ask me to write a short thing if you have a really rad or wonderful idea for something. (This is still to be decided, but let me know if you would like that idea.)
> 
> Anyways, read & review, or leave with a smile. It makes us better writers.

For the past few hours, Beatrice had been wandering through the forest aimlessly. At first, she had tried to retrace the brothers’ footsteps. She traveled from the inn where she had stayed the night and left at daybreak only to backtrack to Ms. Langtree’s schoolhouse.

 _Have I been walking in the wrong direction this whole time?_ In all honesty, she’d never had a very good sense of direction, but as a bird it had been a whole lot easier. Flying up to identify landmarks was one of the only benefits of her curse that, frankly, she missed at that moment. She sighed. She might as well ask for directions since she wasn’t going to grow wings and figure out which way she was supposed to go any time soon.

Beatrice approached the door, the wooden steps creaking as she climbed up. She was about to knock on the door frame when the woman at the chalkboard rang the school bell.

“All right children, I shall see you all for the winter semester.” Young animals in dresses, or trousers and hats walked out of the school on their hind legs, honking and meowing and barking at each other as they went. There didn’t seem to be as many students as she remembered there had been, though Beatrice couldn’t understand why. As far as she remembered, the school’s music concert gathered a renewed interest in the rural community to fund the school’s budget.

“Oh, hello,” Ms. Langtree smiled brightly at her. “Can I help you, young lady?”

“Hello,” Beatrice remembered that the last time she had been here, she’d been a small bird propped on the shoulder of a dunce. There was no possibility that she would be remembered. “I need directions to the lake?”

Ms. Langtree sighed fondly, looking out the window. “Veritas Lake, my fiancée took me out there for a picnic just the afternoon before.”

“Mm _hm_ ,” Beatrice had forgotten what a nut the schoolteacher was when it came to her love life. She just hoped she could get the information she needed before Ms. Langtree launched into a song. “Which way would it be?”

“And why would you need to go there?” Ms. Langtree asked with concern. “Don’t you know why they call it Veritas Lake? The waters can be very dangerous.” Then added, “And romantic.”

Beatrice stopped herself from retorting a chiseled remark. When Wirt decided to carry his brother home, he told her he needed to find a lake. She knew the river by the mill came from one close by, but she had never physically been there. She was not entirely sure why, but Beatrice had most certainly never heard that it was dangerous. “I don’t understand.”

“Young people never stay in school long enough to take an interest in Latin,” Ms. Langtree shook her head like a mother. She beckoned Beatrice to follow her into the kitchen and meal room. “You ought to go home too, the final harvest is very soon. Children should always help their parents prepare.”

Beatrice looked away reflexively, not wanting to think about her parents. The final harvest was not even a celebration that her family participated wholeheartedly in. They weren’t farmers, but they had gone to the festivals and bought honey sweets and listened to strummed guitar and tapped piano music. _There was that one time that Greta knocked the pyramid of squashes into that dumb Smiths boy_ , Beatrice smiled.

“Mashed potatoes, sweetheart?” Ms. Langtree offered her a bowl. “There’s molasses in it, don’t worry.” She directed Beatrice to sit with her at one of the empty long tables.

Beatrice gracefully declined, feeling more disheartened by the second. “I ate this morning.” She could not help but wonder if the students ever sat in their seats at noon, eating spoonfuls of their meal and felt a wave of longing wash over them. Maybe they would not be quite sure what they were longing for, or maybe they would remember a boy scurrying over table tops with a jar in his hand and singing about little pleasures. _Stop being ridiculous_ , Beatrice thought to herself. They had only known the brothers for a day or two.

The schoolteacher stared at her thoughtfully, as if she recognized her in that instant. The moment passed.

“I need to find the lake,” Beatrice said. “I’m looking for something I lost.”

Ms. Langtree smiled warmly. “Something?” She said, “Or someone?”

“Pardon me?” Beatrice asked impatiently. She was beginning to grow tired of older women questioning her about romantic ties. Her frustration with the way society always circled back to fixate young people on courtship and marriage was tiresome, at least as a bird her mother hadn’t been nagging her to find a mate.  
Ms. Langtree shook her head, disregarding her comments, and pointed across the room. “Behind the schoolhouse there is a path covered by a raspberry bush. Follow it and you’ll find the lake.”

Beatrice thanked her and stood to leave. Ms. Langtree stopped her at the door, an expression on her face that Beatrice couldn’t exactly read. It was something like a mixture of confusion and complete, absolute certainty. “Weren’t you a bird before?”

Maybe she had recognized the impatience that Beatrice wore on her face—a face she wore more often than she realized. Perhaps the woman had matched it to the bird that had been her student for a short period of time. But what were the chances of a schoolteacher remembering someone so distant? “No.”

 

<oOo>

Beatrice shivered and wadded back to shore. She was more likely to catch her death than reach the other side.

Beatrice had spent such a long time at the lake that the sun had moved from a mid-morning position to an evening drag in a blink of an eye. She spent part of the morning walking the perimeter of the lake, looking for a boat or a dock of some sort. She had thought that maybe the brothers’ home was on the other side and she searched for a way to cross it to no avail. With a lake this big, she thought that there would have been a busy fish industry and perhaps fishermen she could convince into giving her a ride. The lake, however, and was eerily deserted and quiet. Even the waves were shushed as they touched the beach sand. She eventually stripped down to her last petticoat and wadded waist-deep into the freezing black waters, but without knowing how to swim and worse, how to bring such a heavy pack with her without drowning, there was no way for her to cross the lake. The only other option was to walk around, which she guessed may take a day or so.

Beatrice changed into a clean petticoat and rung the wet one as dry as she could. She figured that she might as well walk until the sun disappeared and continue her hike around the lake at dawn.

As time passed, Beatrice found herself weighed down in doubt. What exactly was she expecting to find on the other side? Another path? A town? What if she didn’t find anything and maybe Wirt had been talking about a different lake? Or some dumb poetic, metaphorical lake? He had asked her to come with them. He had offered her a chance to escape from her life, albeit he did not know that her curse was not the only set of bars imprisoning her. And she had refused it. Beatrice did not regret returning her family into their human forms, but she had asked him to clip her wings for her before they said their goodbyes. She remembered he had agreed after some convincing, but his hands shook the entire time, his breathing erratic, and his tenseness contagious. He had asked her to come with them when she was human, and she had declined once more. She did not even asked if she would ever see them again.

“Every time I say something, I end up making a mistake.” Beatrice muttered to herself, kicking a stone off the path. It always started with her opening her mouth and a nasty slip-of-the-tongue comment, and there was never a happy ending.

Just then, Beatrice heard a strange cry come from her left. She halted and stood very still for a moment, staring into the thicket of trees, unsure if she even heard correctly. Did someone leave their baby in the woods?

Sadly, the case wasn’t uncommon, though unwanted children were usually left at the steps of a church. To leave a babe in the woods was truly a death wish on the child, as the wild things that came out at night would not be as kind as the priests.

The wind rattled the trees and the cry came again, sounding more and more human to Beatrice. She tried to convince herself that there was nothing, and even if there was a child, how could she possibly look after it? Guilt set in as the cries grew louder, weighing pros and cons never felt more shameful. _I have a soft spot for lost kids in the woods_ , she thought sarcastically. Perhaps she could pass the child to a sympathetic mother in a neighbouring town.

Beatrice followed the sound of the cries, trying her best to walk completely straight, and to walk around the thick trees without disorienting herself. Soon she stumbled into a small moor, but as quickly as the cries had grown, they disappeared with the wind.

Beatrice looked around and felt a chill run up her spine. _No._

She knew these trees, but they were not supposed to exist any longer. She had assumed that the Woodsman had destroyed the lantern when Wirt uncovered the truth. The souls that had been trapped within the Edelwood trees had been released, and that was the reason why no one had seen the trees for so long. And yet here they were, a ring of them all around her with misshapen trunks and grooves that resembled frozen faces moaning in agony.

A violent wind from the north jostled the branches above, causing a ripple affect to the roots, the trunks groaning violent human shrieks. Beatrice flinched. She hadn’t heard a baby at all. The crying had come from the trees.

“Hello, _bird_.”

Beatrice spun, the voice sounding so distinct and close and _familiar_.

“What are you doing out of your cage?” The shadows below her feet shifted, and it stretched across the moor, a dark shape composing itself and gathering dark strips of shadow. It constructed itself into the figure of a tall, broad-shouldered human shape with long, branched horns protruding from its skull.

 _No, no_ , no. _This can’t be_. Beatrice made a break for it, but found that she couldn’t move her feet. Black roots had ensnared themselves around her shoes without her even noticing. “No need to be rude,” he said haughtily, sounding as though he had actually taken offense. “Why don’t you stay a while?”

Beatrice intended to keep quiet and think up a way to escape. Her father may have packed a knife in her pack. Instead, she found herself saying, “You’re supposed to be dead!”

The shadow enlarged, frigid air brushing her face, and the darkness surrounded the spot she stood on. “Well I am _not_.” He roared, “No gratitude to give to you and your _stupid_ gnome boy and that _pathetic_ woodsman.” Beatrice stood her ground, fighting the urge to struggle out of the roots and run. The Beast did not seem very powerful, he couldn’t even hurt her. He was nothing but shadows from an invisible light source. What she could not understand was how he had survived without the lantern that kept him alive, without his _soul_. The Beast had calmed, a ghastly silence filling the space between them as the shadow circled her grudgingly. “Tell me, what are you doing so far from home?”

“I’m not going to tell you anything,” spat Beatrice. He had no power over her.

The wind blew and Beatrice shivered. “Did the bluebird try to swim?”

Beatrice clutched her arms around herself, recoiling from the question. “Get away from me.”

He laughed coldly, enjoying her discomfort. Beatrice thought hard, knowing her father was generally a practical man. He would not have let his daughter leave on a journey without some form of defense, and if he had left her a knife or a pistol, he would have put it in an easily accessible pocket. “I don’t die because I can not.” The Beast said finally. “Before the lot of your kind called me the Beast, I was known as something else.” He lowered his voice, instilled with a lilt of interest. “I was the Gatekeeper.” Beatrice inched her arm behind her, stretching her hand slowly towards the side pocket and finding the knot that held the leather flaps together. “Do you know why they call it Veritas Lake?” Beatrice would have rolled her eyes if she hadn’t been busy with trying to keep herself focused on opening the pocket compartment while remaining calm. “In this case, ‘veritas’ means reality. Can I ask you something, bird?” The air chilled and voice of the Beast was so close that she swore he had to have been whispering in her ear. “How do you know you are alive?”

Beatrice was caught so off guard that she stopped trying to find the knife for a moment. “Excuse me?”

What did he mean if how she knew she was _alive_? She was shivering to death for Heaven’s sake. If that did not prove she was alive, she was not sure what equated to being “alive” in the first place. Beatrice was not one to think philosophically, but something stirred within her. Something responded, something disturbingly _certain_. Sometimes Wirt would say things that did not make sense to her—things that no one understood but Greg. Up until then, she had dismissed them as the quirks of being Wirt, but now that she thought about it, something was not right.

What did the Beast mean by _Gatekeeper_?

Beatrice snapped, “I’m not dead.”

The Beast laughed again, this time the trees swaying and crying out along with him in a distressed melody. “Of course,” he said. “But the gnome boy and his brother? Now _they_ are alive. All the truly living, _free_ things come from behind the gate.” Beatrice only felt more and more confused. “You sincerely are a caged bird,” The Beast said with a hint of sympathy. “No matter what you do, or what you are. You can not escape the duties you were born to fulfill, nor escape the memory of the times you did feel you were liberated.

“But I can change that,” The Beast offered diplomatically. “I can offer you _one_ chance—enough time to leave this world behind you to find your purpose. I have enough power to send someone through the gate,” he paused in his pacing. “On one condition.”

Beatrice lowered her arm from the pocket, a million questions and feelings running through her mind and chest but unable to fix on just one. “What is your condition?”

“You will have one year through the gate. And when you say your goodbyes, your gnome boy and kettle child must be on this side of the gate to do so.”

“You’re asking me,” Beatrice came to the realization, “to bring them back with me?”

“Only to say goodbye,” The Beast said, suspiciously casual. Beatrice knew that this was wrong, that the Beast lived off of cleverly disguised contracts and covenants, eating at the contractor alive. No, absolutely _not_ , she would not go through with the offer. But if what the Beast had said was true, if Wirt and Greg had passed through some kind of magical gate to get home, would she be able to find some other evil shadow to open this gate for her? Was she going to pass up the only chance she had to escape once more? If she did, she could wander around the lake for days, months, maybe years and never get any closer to her destination. She would have to go home eventually, feeling no better than when she had left. Beatrice did not want to hang her head, to flee or remember that she was, and always would be, a coward deep down inside in her heart. She had been courageous once. She could be courageous again.   

“Do we have a deal?” The shadow held out a flickering hand.

Beatrice unclenched her fists, which she had just then realized were balled up so tightly her fingers had drained white. “Fine.” She wasn’t entirely sure how to shake it, so she placed her palm on the ground and said, “Deal.”

Suddenly, the trees groaned and creaked horrifically. They twisted and bent in unnatural ways all around her, the wind screamed in her ears. She jumped but could only watch in horror as the branches shot out and grabbed hold of her arms and legs before she could react. They wrapped tightly around and around until they spiraled from her shoulders to her wrists, and knee-deep in woodland vines. She struggled against them, shouting angrily to keep herself from showing how terrified she truly was. “What are you doing? Let me free!”

“I’m helping you,” the Beast said genuinely, wavering dim fingers and drumming them in the air. “But first, let’s fulfill the primary part of your end of the bargain, _hm_?”

“Why you fiendish—” Her voice caught in her throat as a thick, black branch slowly unraveled itself and peeled down towards her. It was shaped like a deformed arm, its long fingers with disease in its bark. There were bubbles along the skin of the tree, tumors that glowed red and sap that oozed and trickled liquid ebony between the cracks. Fingers, seemingly an index and thumb, were pinched together, holding a small, glowing orb. When the hand was close enough for her to identify the orb, Beatrice realized, to her horror, that the orb was a pale, skin-coloured seed. It pulsed red, and even with the blood rushing through her ears, she could hear the unmistakable sound of a heartbeat.

She struggled wildly, trying to wriggle out of the Edelwood branches’ grasps, but they only squeezed harder until it felt like her bones would snap into pieces. “Stop—what are you doing? _No, no, no, no_ — _unhand me!_ _I said, no! STOP!_ ”

The Beast shushed her, and the branch continued to extend towards her without stop. “You have to play by my rules, Bluebird.” He clicked his tongue at her, speaking with a mockingly knowing tone as if she was a troublesome toddler. “You do everything we agreed on,” she swore she heard him smile, “ _without_ your voice.”

She tried to resist still, twisting her head away, squirming and worming and trying to pry her hands out of their restraints. A strong branch coiled itself around her thrashing head, keeping her locked in place.

The fingers, brittle and icy, pressed the seed against her throat. The seed began to burn and the cold fingers continued to push the seed, harder and harder until it was choking her to breathe. It was as though the seed was trying to lodge itself into her neck. The seed reached unbearable temperatures and Beatrice tried not to let out a sound. She bit her lip and felt her eyes prickle with tears.

 _This is not happening_ , she tried to lie to herself. _You’re dreaming, Beatrice. This is a nightmare_. She repeated it to herself until it became a mantra, a chant to keep herself from crying out. She tried to imagine herself that morning, waking up at the Maisie Inn and the wrinkled maid who had knocked at the door with a simple breakfast of fresh cow milk, porridge, and honey. She would have waited until it was cool enough to eat, then packed her things to leave. But instead of walking further into the forest, she would have stood at the door of the inn in contemplation, thought about all the things her family had sacrificed for her, all the burdens she had placed on them, and Beatrice imagined herself deciding to return home. She imagined knocking at the door and her mother throwing it open, sad eyes turning to anger, turning to relief, and turning to a mixture of sadness and pride. Oh, what Beatrice would give at that moment to make her mother proud once more.

The heartbeat was in her ears, but she couldn’t tell if it was from the seed or if it was her own. She felt as though she had fallen neck-first into a pile of burning coals, throat ablaze with a heat like fire.

And then she couldn’t take it anymore. She screamed and screamed as the seed boiled her every layer of skin into bubbles of air and sank into her burning flesh. “Stop being so dramatic.” All she could see was the fading light of the sun, a colour dragging itself across the sky from one end to the other. The inside of her mouth tasted metallic, dry, so obviously inhuman. Every part of her felt alive and unfamiliar, like the nerves that she had never noticed before only existed to screech and plea and squeal apologies to her now. Somehow, amidst the searing pain and her remaining focus to try and breathe, _for God’s sakes_ , she heard him say, “You should be thanking me. I’m making things easier for you.” _Breathe, God damn it, breathe, Beatrice! Breathe, breathe, breathe_ —

She couldn’t differentiate colours anymore; what was black or white, or what was in between. Shapes became foreign and liquid, and she was unable to retain their importance— _are they important?_ She was tired. She heard someone screaming, but she wasn’t sure if it mattered. _I’m so tired_. The screaming was loud  & long & full of sobs & begging & pleading— _shut it_ _up_ , _I can’t sleep like this_ —like incomprehensible loud & shattering music that was hard to stop listening to. The screaming wailed & echoed over her head, then somewhere behind her, & faded. _Or did it just cut like a ribbon between the blades of scissors?_ But the point was, it had stopped, she just didn’t know if it was because the voice had stopped existing or if she had stopped existing to hear it. _Can I cease to exist but still think?_ Then a thought, somehow knowing it was not her own— _somehow I can still have the ability to know_ —said something to her amidst the chaos & the creeping darkness that blanketed her, protecting her. She greeted it, let herself succumb to it. She was so tired. _So & so & so tired.  
_

_Without a voice, how could you possibly make a mistake?_

_So & so & so tired._

It was the first time she had, quite literally, fallen into sleep.


	4. "Bound to Bed"

“          , she       to       a hospital.”

“No,       We can’t       t. They’re         want official docu         I don’t     know if         has   birth   tificate!”

“Wirt, if   doesn’t wake   ,   condition             lly serious.”

“ don’t… I       know. We     —can’t       her   the hospital. I’ll think of something.”

Beatrice heard voices before she opened her eyes. One voice sounded unbearably familiar, the other was harder to place. She couldn’t hear everything they were saying, and it was even harder to register the meanings of the words she did catch. Her mind was a mess, as if someone had gone and stuck a wooden spoon into it and stirred everything into a chaotic mixture. It took her a moment to open her eyes, which hurt as it seemed her lids had been glued shut for a while.

She was in a dimly lit room with a large window to her left covered with extremely long and beautifully embroiled and overall expensive-looking curtains. The entire room seemed to look that way, in fact. The bed she was in, for instance, was massive. It could have fit at least four of her siblings, and the blankets were thick and sweet-smelling. There was a long book shelf that was filled to the brim with thin books and little painted figurines. Beside it was a large, skillfully-embellished wooden box with stuffed toys, and in the corner to the left was a locked door. The walls were painted a light orange, with white frames around the door and ceiling. She looked up above her head to see a very plain clock that had seemingly been built into the wall.

Beatrice tried to sit up, but every muscle ached and trembled, making it hard for her to even turn her head. _I have to find out where I am_ , she thought dozily. There was still a fog before her eyes, like a veil that she could not remove, draped over her head that kept her from being able to fully understand _where_ and _why_ and _how_. She tried calling out to the voices, which sounded like they were coming from behind the door, but they could have been coming from the book case. Or maybe from the golden-sprayed chandelier of the high ceiling above her head? She could only hear a sharp breath escape her lips.

Beatrice started.

_Where’s my voice?_

She moved to touch her neck. She felt along her trachea until she found a lump in her throat—literally. It was solid and small, but lodged expertly so that she would have to be looking for it to find it. Beatrice, experimentally, pressed one warm finger on the spot. Immediately, her throat felt as thought it had been set aflame. She breathed out hard, unable to make a more startling noise, and squeezed her eyes shut. The feeling washed over her and passed like a warning. She would not be trying that again any time soon.

Just then, a clicking noise came from the door. Beatrice’s eyes immediately fluttered closed—another bad habit of escaping confrontation that she had developed. The sound of small feet padding into the room sounded sharper without vision, as if all visuals were concentrated in sound.

“Hi Beatrice,” whispered a young, optimistic voice. She recognized it on the spot. Greg. “Jason Funderburker also says hello. Wirt said you need a lot of sleep, so I’ll sit over here and we’ll be really quiet until you wake up.”

Another voice, coming from the hallway said in soft frustration, “Greg, we have to go home now.”

Beatrice remembered this voice now as one of the voices from earlier. A voice that had said this kind of statement so many times that she couldn’t help associating the word ‘home’ with his voice.

“Okay,” Greg called back quietly. “See you tomorrow Beatrice.” His feet padded out of the room, then out of the echoing hallway.

Feeling more alert than before, Beatrice’s eyes blinked open and she forced herself to sit up despite all the tender muscles and aching joints in her body pleading her not to. She looked over at the light source, hoping that she might be able to find a candle holder to give her light source mobility, preferably to help her around the room, and was struck dumbfound. The light seemed to be a kind of flame within a small glass capsule. It was anchored to the wall at calf-height, extremely bright for its size, and shaped like a cow.

 _Okay_ , Beatrice thought. _This can’t be the weirdest thing I’ve seen_.  

“Sorry, I left my hat in—“ Greg re-entered the room, presumably to retrieve the kettle left in the rocking chair by the door when he caught sight of Beatrice, one leg hanging off the bed. “Beatrice!” Greg practically exclaimed.

Beatrice desperately tried to quiet him, putting her index finger over her lips, but he was already out the door and yelling up a storm. Seconds later, feet thundered up a staircase and two figures stood by the door. One was a boy too thin for his clothes, ears too big for his face, and a frown too comfortable on his mouth for his age—it was undeniably Wirt even without a red cone-shaped hat and blue cape. The other was a girl Beatrice had never seen before. She was slightly shorter than Wirt, with rather masculine clothing, dark skin, and short-clipped but bobbing hair.

“See Wirt? She’s okay!” Greg pulled Wirt into the room to the foot of the bed post. He looked extremely worried and hesitant all at once, as if the words were still trying to formulate themselves in his head. The girl, however, took action immediately. She was by Beatrice’s side in a blink of an eye, apologizing and gently peeling open a bandage on Beatrice’s head that she hadn’t even realized was there.

“That’s…” the girl said, “really weird. I could have sworn she had a bloody gash here yesterday.”

“Beatrice,” Wirt said, the utmost concern written all over his face, having found the words he decided to say. “What happened?”

What a loaded question, Beatrice would have answered sarcastically if she could have. Instead, she shrugged, mostly because she wasn’t sure how to explain and partially because she didn’t know if she was allowed to. How was she supposed to tell Wirt that he and Greg had to come back with her? After all they had been through there? It only struck Beatrice, right then, how impossible the Beast’s agreement was.

“How did you get here from the Unknown? How are you even…? Are you _hurt_? Are you _okay_?” Wirt seemed to have been finally coming to grips with the reality of the situation. “Say something!”  

Beatrice opened her mouth, about reassure them that everything was fine, about to spin a lie when she was reminded by the sound her breath through her lips that nothing was going to come out.

“What’s wrong?” The girl asked, seeing Beatrice struggle and then become silent.

“She lost her voice!” Greg said.

But how? Beatrice rubbed her eyes. It made no sense. Wirt and Greg had both entered the land of the Unknown without losing anything, and Beatrice had lost her voice?

“Greg,” Wirt hissed. “Stop joking around, this is serious.”

“No, wait,” the girl hushed the two boys. She turned her attention back to Beatrice, a piercing determination glimmering in her eyes as she introduced herself as Sara, pardoned herself and asked to look at her neck. Beatrice, doubtful, decided to let her. “She could speak before, right?”

“She—” Wirt panicked. “She was a bird before! A-and I guess she could talk when she was human, at least I think? No—no, yes! She definitely could.”

“Look at this.”

Wirt’s eyes widened, Greg made a painful expression, and even the frog in the bib pocket of Greg’s long blue trousers seemed to cringe. Just as Beatrice was getting annoyed, Sara pulled out a hand-mirror from a drawer under the bed. She handed it to Beatrice, the glass facing downwards and the back up so that she would have to turn it over herself.

A large white scar lined her neck, not completely noticeable, but noticeable enough when pointed out. She looked like she was decapitated in a past life—a souvenir from sins she had committed in another world that only showed to remind her not to step out of line. In the middle, like when she had touched it, was a tiny lump, slightly larger than an apple seed.    

“Beatrice, what… happened?” Wirt said again. This time, his voice was even. There was a hint of anger there—an emotion so characteristically _wrong_ for a boy like Wirt to have.

A voice entered her mind, or rather, an echo of a voice. Something she had heard before, like that of a dream but had been forgotten until something in her waking world reminded her of it.

 _Without a voice, how could you make a mistake_?

Beatrice suddenly realized what the Beast had meant.

<oOo>

Wirt was frustrated.   
  
Beatrice had been out for nearly a day, and when she had awoken, the number of oddities and questions had only increased and the answers were few and unsatisfactory. Wirt remembered seeing her as a human right before they had left the Unknown. She had been taller than him, a little older too with red curls framing her face and slender fingers that left streams of goosebumps on his forearm in their wake. He had _never_ , however, seen the large milk-white slash across her throat. He would have remembered something as distressing as a scar over her neck that made her look like window-shop mannequin with a copy-and-paste head. The fact that she couldn’t speak was like the icing and cherry on top for his overflowing stress. He remembered that she could speak perfectly fine before they had left the Unknown. But then, when he really tried to recall the moments after she had turned into a human again, he realized he couldn’t recall the words. Some psychological door had locked him out, a barrier he had put there himself so that he wouldn’t revert back into “post-Unknown Wirt”. It was a touchy point in his memories that triggered a lot of fright that he was not willing to unlock, even now when he needed to remember.

Greg rummaged around in his over-stuffed backpack filled with crumpled drawings and loose papers and unfolded sweaters. He managed to find a pad and pen for Beatrice, but none of her answers to Wirt’s questions made any sense to him.

“What do you mean ‘Through the lake’?” Wirt demanded earnestly, almost ordering her and yet almost pleading. He must have sounded desperate, milking all the information he could out of her vague descriptions.

Beatrice glared at him, flipping to a new page and scribbled, “The same lake you and Greg went through, dunce.”

Wirt pressed on. “But how?”

Beatrice gave him a long, unreadable look. Finally, she shrugged. “I am not quite sure.” When Wirt asked about her scar, she shrugged ambiguously again and wrote, “Mill work is dangerous.”

“Calm down, Wirt,” Sara placed a placid hand on his arm, then turned to Beatrice and began to ask her own questions. “Does your throat hurt?”

Beatrice shook her head.

“When you breathe?”

She shook her head again.

“What about when you swallow?”

After assessing that Beatrice wasn’t in immediate medical danger, Sara asked her to try and walk. It was clear, however, after a couple of floundered attempts that Beatice could not stand for more than five seconds on her own, let alone walk. Sara deemed her unsuited for wandering about and prescribed her to bed until her condition improved, which she guessed could take a few days.

“Do you have any food?” Greg asked Sara. “Jason Funderburker and me are hungry.”

As if on cue, the sound of furious rumbling came from Beatrice’s stomach. She clutched her torso, turning violent shades of red with embarrassment.

“Crap,” Sara slapped her forehead. “I forgot, you haven’t eaten in more than twenty-four hours. I’ll be right back.”

Wirt sat frozen by the bed until he felt Sara pull him by the wrist to get up. He followed her out the door, down the hallway and the long staircase. Once in the pantry, Sara emptied out a life-times’ supply of rice crackers (“She’s not vomiting on my watch—plain food only.”) into a large salad bowl when she finally looked up at Wirt. He’d kept silent all the way down and was distracted by the large Kenyan tapestry on the back wall. His eyes followed the distinct orange diamond shapes that wove into a grid system, working in perfect harmony with the animal squares around it.

“What’s wrong?”

Wirt looked away. “N-nothing.”

He heard her snort in disbelief. He felt his cheeks redden, suddenly feeling silly for his pathetic attempt to hide the anxiety he so obviously showed with Beatrice. “Jason is literally the only person who stutters even when he has nothing to hide,” she crossed her arms, signaling that she could accept lies on any other subject, but he could not bullshit his way out of this one.  

Wirt understood that he hadn’t opened himself up to a lot of people about his emotional and mental instability, and they didn’t blame him. No one ever pushed him, which was a relief. But sometimes it was nice to be reminded, to know that someone still wanted to push because they hadn’t forgotten to worry about him. Sometimes he felt that he owed an explanation to them, and he honestly wanted to relieve himself of his burdens, but something always stopped him. _How much of what I say would they believe?_

But this was Sara. The earnest girl. The one who refused to give up, the one he crushed on _hard_ because there was something about her determination to clear away the clutter and understand the riddles that made her amazing. This was her element, this was what made Sara, well, _Sara_.

“I saw,” he mumbled finally, “I saw her grave.”

Sara’s eyes widened. She looked as though she was sure she had heard him wrong. He repeated himself, and still she had that look. Like she had been expecting something, _anything_ , but this was outside the range of expectation. “That… doesn’t make sense.”

“You’re telling me,” He sighed, letting his head fall back for a moment before craning his neck forward and looking at the marble floor tiles.

“Wirt,” Sara said. “She can’t have a grave.” She said it in a voice that was meant to calm him, trying to work through the nonsense like it was ninth grade English again. Like this was nothing more than a crooked Shakespeare tragedy that could be laughed about outside a classroom. Like it was trivial in the grand scheme of things.

Wirt rubbed his temples. She wouldn’t understand if he had just bombed the information on her without context. No one would understand, not even Greg. Greg hadn’t seen the grave because Beatrice’s gravestone wasn’t in the graveyard.

“She _does_ ,” his shoulders shook as he exhaled slowly, breathing exercises failing him like they always did but the habit to try anyway remained.

Sara held his trembling shoulders gentle but firmly. “I don’t know what you’re thinking right now, but listen to me. Your friend is _alive_ ,” she told him with reassurance, squeezing lightly. “She’s upstairs, Wirt. She’s okay.”

“You don’t believe me,” he pulled away. “I get it. You think I’m crazy— _God_ , even _I_ think I’m crazy, but you have no idea…” He swallowed hard. “ _She’s not supposed to_ be _here_.”

Sara stared at him. He immediately regretted his words—wished that he could take it all back—because the way she looked at him right then, the way her brow knitted and her jaw tightened and her eyes squinted with calculation, it was as if she wasn’t sure she knew him. As if he had become a _stranger_.

Wirt knew he was still himself, and sometimes he believed that coming back from the Unknown had changed him for the best. He cared for Greg and cherished the relationships and people he had around him more than he ever had, but sometimes it felt like the Unknown had taken something away from him. Something that made him cling to the light in a dimly-lit room. Something that made him believe that closing his eyes was like surrendering to the dark.

“You’re saying we should have left her to die?” Sara stated, an offended tone creeping into her voice.

“What?” Wirt was caught off guard. “Left her to— _no!_ No, no _no_ , of course not!” He covered his face with his hands. “You’re _completely_ misunderstanding what I’m trying to… _ugh_ , this is so messed up.”

“Clear it up for me,” Sara asked quietly.

Wirt felt his heart sink. She couldn’t understand. Back in an Outdoor Ed. class that Wirt had been forced to take, when the weather had grown calm and warm and the teacher planned a hiking trip through the local forests—that was where Wirt had found the grave. He had nearly lapsed back into his old self. Sara couldn’t understand how, when he had stumbled upon it while searching for an outhouse, he had fallen to his knees and refused to believe his eyes. How the little engraved bluebirds around her name—how he had used his hands and swept away the rotten, wet leaves away and hoping he had imagined “Age Eighteen”—no. She couldn’t understand. No one could understand how he had remembered in that moment, very suddenly, how delicate her wings were between his fingers—between the metal blades of the golden scissors.   
And the deafening snap of her bones.

“I think you should leave,” Sara muttered, hugging the salad bowl to her chest. “She can stay for as long as she needs to. It’s nice to have people living in the house with me for a change.”

Greg stole about ten rice crackers before they left. Face stuffed with crackers, he waved up at Beatrice’s window enthusiastically even though the bed was too far from the window to see her, and she couldn’t have crawled out of bed to stand by the sill. Wirt didn’t look up to check. Instead, he slipped his hand into his brother’s, not exactly pulling him but guiding him along the sidewalk. A silence fell over them. Greg squeezed his brother’s hand hesitantly, as if asking an unspoken question that he hoped his older brother would understand. Wirt took a few moments to respond. He wiggled his fingers slightly but said nothing. Greg smiled, as if the simple gesture was all he needed, all the confirmation he would _ever_ need from him.

Wirt couldn’t find it in him to tell Greg about the grave. Not now, maybe not ever. Instead, Wirt stared at the road ahead, refusing to look back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So finals are over, that's a major plus.
> 
> I'm really sorry that y'all have waited for more than a week and you're only getting a meager quarter of work for a chapter that I usually write. I drew some messy wips (work in progress stuff) to make up for it, plus I promise a more lengthy chapter on Wednesday. (I may extend this chapter because, in all honesty, I was really rushing through this and you all deserve better than that.)  
> Again, thank you for your support and reading! Wander over to my profile for my tumblr if you ever get bored. Sometimes I upload dumb Over the Garden Wall art and sketches that I have no time to colour. 
> 
> EDIT: Of course I catch the flu on Christmas Eve and when I'm supposed to update this fic. Ah, fate, thou art a cruel bastard. 
> 
> I've extended the chapter to a length and place in the story that I am satisfied with, so Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate it! Happy Holidays to those of you who don't and I'll see you all on Wednesday with an actual chapter update! As an additional gift, I've come to the realization that there is absolutely no way I'm going to be able to finish this fic in 10 chapters. Especially with the way I'm writing it, 10 chapters is just not going to do. I'm leaving it as an ambiguous "?" because I really don't know how many chapters it will take to fit all my headcanons for this prompt. 
> 
> Anyways, sorry for the delay! Read & review, or leave with a smile. It makes us better writers.


	5. "Ninety Degrees to Normal"

Beatrice’s quick recovery surpassed everyone’s expectations, including herself. She was not entirely sure whether it had to do with the Beast or the seed (which no one seemed to have noticed, save for her own observation), but it was extremely likely that there was something more to her fast healing than just a whole lot of rest and medicine. Within twenty-four hours, Beatrice was able to wander about on her legs with very little headache or nausea as though a miracle had fixed her up overnight. All the wounds that Sara had patched up when they had first rescued her from hyperthermia and infection were gone, including the distressingly deep and bloody ones. Sara began to say something in response, but decided against it. It was a Friday morning and she appeared to be quite finished with trying to solve problems even Beatrice did not understand. She left instructions for Beatrice (“I made porridge with fruits and stuff, if you’re okay with that. You don’t need to touch the oven or microwave.”) while she was at school, and promised to return by quarter to four in the afternoon.

Beatrice decided to use her time to explore the house and familiarize herself in her new environment. Sara’s home was incredibly large for a family that was absent near most of the time. Beatrice couldn’t blame the girl for leaving doors closed and all sorts of equipment turned on and sputtering chatter into the quiet. Beatrice knew for certain that she would have gone insane in such desolation. She was overwhelmed, however, by the immense amount of machines everywhere. Boxes of all shapes and sizes—some in the kitchen, some on the floor, some built into the walls and on the ceilings—all with different purposes. The ones on the ceiling, for example, were used to light up the room. Sara had explained the night before how to use them. There was a lever, or a switch, on the wall that controlled the usage of the box. Beatrice was aware that electrically-powered light bulbs existed where she was from, but they were rare and incredibly expensive as they were immovable and impractical for an already-built house.

Here, Beatrice found at least one in every hallway and room, each with the power of fifty candles minus the heat. It seemed that in practice, light bulbs were better than any candlelight and apparently inexpensive in this realm.

There were other intriguing boxes, such as the one in the room with the fireplace. It was about the size of your five year old brother George, but wider and extremely thin. It hung on the wall like a portrait and lit up with all sorts of sounds, colours and moving pictures. It was as if there were whole worlds inside the object mimicking the one she lived in, and could be observed and flipped through with a flick of the finger on a device called a remote. Beatrice found herself sucked into spending one to two hours before noon completely immersed in what Sara called a “movie”. She couldn’t quite remember the title, but the storyline was too fast for her to keep up with, the female lead too indecisive, and the male character much too sparkly and invasive for comfort.    

By the time Sara arrived home, Beatrice had explored most of the house and, in the process, had accidentally locked herself in the bathroom for half an hour.

Beatrice was overwhelmed, but not in an entirely unpleasant way. She had been in large houses before, larger than this one in fact (such as the tea merchant’s). It was the sheer complexity and alien-ness of everything, things that seemed familiar like tables and doors were really not familiar at all. There was a transparent casing around the table that Sara called a plastic cover, and the doors had highly mechanized locks that did not require a key, only to push and twist the handle. (Beatrice had only finally understood how the bathroom lock worked after Sara had patiently guided her through the steps from behind the door.)

It was all a bit surreal, really. How everything in the house echoed that of her own in an impossibly instinctual way. Though she supposed that was not surprising, considering that Wirt and Greg had functioned well enough in her world. She guessed that she was just imagining a lot of things, after all, she had almost died a couple days ago. There were bound to be side-effects.

Beatrice and Sara sat side-by-side at the kitchen table, eating cookies and watching another of those moving-picture boxes that sat nuzzled under some newspapers and a knitted pink doily. Beatrice fingered a page on her notepad, stuck between the feeling of wanting to talk and not knowing how to start. Before she could try, Sara started for her.  

“So,” Sara said a little awkwardly, resting her head in her hands, elbows propped on the plastic surface. “Wirt told me you were a bird for a while. What was that like?”

Beatrice paused. “Acrophobic,” she wrote on the pad with a sarcastic smile.

Beatrice managed to get a chuckle out of her host who had been frowning for the most part before striking up the conversation. This had to have been the first laugh she had heard after waking from her unconsciousness, and it was good to hear such a warm sound.

A soft buzzing sound interrupted them. Sara pulled a small box out of her pocket, stared at it, and tucked it away. The box had done its damage, however, and the smile was gone.

“What is that?” Beatrice wrote and motioned the little box she had held in her hand.

“Oh,” Sara shrugged. “Cell phone. It’s like a telephone, but your can bring it with you anywhere you want.”

Beatrice felt shock. She motioned to see it, and Sara handed her the small little object no larger than her own hand.

“You’ve really never seen a cell phone before?”

Beatrice shook her head, turning it this way and that, and nearly dropping it on the floor when Sara pressed a button that let the box emit colourful lights.

“Can I ask you something?”

Beatrice nodded, still unable to take her eyes away from the screen.

“You’re… really not from around here, are you?”

Beatrice blinked up at her host, an expression of worry and faltering and… something hopeful on her face. Something like trust. Beatrice grabbed her note pad and wrote, “Have they told you about the Unknown?”

Sara bit her lip, and nodded slowly.

“Then you know where I’m from.”

“What is it like?” She asked, the hopefulness ebbing away and turning into something rougher, something anxious. “Is it dangerous?”

Beatrice gave her a quizzical look. It was as thought she was trying to find something now, a piece of evidence, a shred of proof. How could any life not include danger or risk? But maybe that wasn’t what she was looking for, maybe she was looking for something bigger, darker, messier. “Am I supposed to compare it to this world?” She tapped the tip of the pen on the pad, “I haven’t seen much of this one.”

Sara leaned back in her chair, taking a moment to herself and rubbing the back of one hand. “It’s just that—forget it. It’s okay.”

The buzz came again and Sara ignored it. She got up and put the plates in a box that washed the dishes (which Beatrice thought would have been extremely convenient at her home).

“Wirt seems a little unhappy that I am here,” Beatrice finally wrote.

Sara paused in the kitchen, smiling a little. “Is that what you’re worried about? Look, Bea. He’s been like this for a while. Don’t worry about it.”

She could have ignored it. Beatrice could have ignored the way Sara tried to shrug her off, but her host’s words unnerved her.

“What do you mean ‘a while’?” She tapped the notepad incessantly until Sara turned around.

She leaned against the counter, staring at the small notebook as if willing the question to rearrange into something easier to talk about. “Since he came back. Something… got rattled loose inside him. I don’t know—PTSD is what the doctors say. He had a near-death experience, but no one is really sure. I’m probably throwing you off, sorry.”

Beatrice had seen it, and she was right. There was a heavier undertone to his words, his voice, the way he walked—Beatrice wasn’t completely sure, but Sara wasn’t wrong.

“It’s tiring how when someone leaves, you try to fill up the space where they used to be with the emotion of missing them,” Beatrice scribbled on the pad. “But you can never fill the space to the top. And when they come back, they’ve changed shape and don’t fit in that space anymore.”

Sara took the pad in her hands gingerly, a small shiver making her hands shake. She blinked rapidly, eyes clear yet glossy under the dim light. “You know what we need?” Sara swallowed, her voice recovering back to its normal pitch. “A dance party.”

Beatrice stared at the girl incredulously. “What?” She taped the page with frantic alarm, but Sara was already gone.

Beatrice found her in the living room, playing with a box as big as her cell phone in the corner. Out of politeness, and maybe also out of fear, Beatrice sat herself on the armchair closest to the doorway. Moments later, the sound of piano keys came bounding off the walls, the ceiling, the floor—Beatrice was too confused to pinpoint the source. It was clear as a bell—no, clearer than even live music. The piano shakes, pounds across the carpet, shambling up the curtains. The entire room shudders in anticipation of an earthquake. The very walls felt unreliable to hold up the ceiling. Somehow, she managed to hear Sara scream, “Dance party!” before she can’t quite hear anything but the hammering of the music and her own heart in her chest. Sara pulled her on her feet, encouraging Beatrice to do something, even if it was just to move. “You got’ta dance too, get those blues out of you!”

Amidst the chaos of her panic, Beatrice managed to remember how to waltz, so she reflexively pretended to dance with an invisible partner. The song was all wrong though, the count of four did not match with a dance born for a count of three beats and Beatrice found herself stumbling. Sara laughed at her, and Beatrice glared back, hoping that she’d recognize the look of someone who had no idea what she was doing. “Don’t pay attention to the dance steps,” she yelled over the thundering of the walls, grinning. “Feel the music!”

 _This is music?_ Beatrice wondered how the definition of music could have been so drastically different to what she was used to in her world. When Beatrice listened, though, there was perhaps something in the tune that wasn’t just noise, something that was appealingly alive. There was a fast drumming and strumming beat that hit her insides and made her knees bounce. _Hm_ , she thought, _feel it_.  

Beatrice started with just tapping her foot along, but that soon felt way to conservative. She sachéd across the room, flitting between the warm carpet and the cool marble floor that kept her on her toes. “Yeah!” Sara shouted, laughter soon drowned by a deep bass. Sara jumped onto a long armchair (“It’s called a couch.”), shaking her head and practically bouncing the stuffing out of the cushions.

Beatrice couldn’t help but grin back. Feeling wild, she jumped on the couch opposite and sprung from armchair to couch with wild abandon, challenging herself to get across the room without touching the floor. All the self-consciousness, all the sadness seemed to ebb away in the roaring of piano and guitar and percussion and other instruments she could not even name. The words of the song were profane and too forward with too much double entendre, but they seemed to lose their meaning in the elated melody—as if words really didn’t hold power over anything.

Beatrice must have looked like a madwoman, but she didn’t feel like one. She would never have categorized what she was doing as dancing. There was no strict order; no instructional steps; no precise limits. She couldn’t even vouch for its grace because there was no grace. She wasn’t even dancing with a partner, and for some reason, she loved that. There was something about it that reminded her of when she was a bird, when she first stretched her wings and felt the breeze filter through each feather tip.

She had fooled herself into believing she was an empty creature, devoid of any purpose but to undo her mistakes but that wasn’t true. As a human, to bird, to human again, she had never been empty.

“What the _hell_ is going on in here?”

Sara fell from the couch and unintentionally kicked the small box. The walls abruptly stopped shaking, the ceiling remained still, even the light seemed to brighten in attention. Standing in the doorframe was a tall young woman, hands holding brown bags full of food, and a nasty scowl that echoed that of Sara’s.

Beatrice stood petrified, undecided between getting off the couch and hoping that if she didn’t move, maybe the stranger wouldn’t see her.

“Mary,” Sara said from the floor, rubbing her back from the fall, “this is my friend Beatrice.” The woman gave Beatrice half a glance, but continued to glare at Sara. Whoever she was, Sara was not surprised to see her, if only a bit embarrassed.

“Beatrice,” she gestured to the woman awkwardly. “This is my sister Mary.”

 

<oOo>

 

“Can we get candy?”

Their mother continued to roll the cart down the aisle without so much as hesitating. “We already have a box for Halloween.”

“No, for me!” Greg patted his stomach energetically, which growled in response. Sometimes Wirt was sure Greg could simply will his stomach to growl, as his stomach was always on cue.

Their mother stopped to check the apples, inspecting them for bruises. “Sorry, honey.”

“Road to hell is paved with unbought Mars bars.” Wirt said, leaning against the cart, dangling a chocolate bar between his fingers.

Their mother smiled sarcastically, still looking through the fruit. Greg’s father leaned over and whispered, “I’ll pry some loose for you when I get there.”

“John!”

Wirt laughed.

“Fine, have it your way.” His mother waved a hand at them. She shook a plastic bag open and piled the apples she had deemed worthy into it. “Only one each. And you’re paying for them, John.”

Greg had taken the concept of “one” as an item that would not break apart into smaller wrapped pieces of candy, so he found a Hershey kiss the size of his head and pointedly defended his case until his father shrugged and paid for the cavity-guaranteed item.

When they arrived home, it was close to eight and Greg insisted that he go to Sara’s place to visit Beatrice. After declining to go with him, Greg left and Wirt sat in his room with a blank page sitting on his desk. He spent a while trying to twirl a pencil around his fingers, not exactly thinking about anything. He couldn’t concentrate on poetry and he was too distracted to play the clarinet, so he found himself wasting away in his chair like most teenagers his age. It was ironic, in a way, how this was the closest he’d been in the past few months to feeling more or less “normal”.

Wirt couldn’t bring himself to see Beatrice, and now even Sara. He had avoided her all day at school, which hadn’t been that hard seeing as he didn’t have any classes with her this semester, but Beatrice was a different matter. When he had seen her, he had initially been filled with overwhelming relief and happiness, but then other feelings followed. A twisting knot in his stomach developed, a strangling anxiety that filled his head with questions of _why_ , and _who_ , and _how_. Then past few nights, those feelings began to seep into his dreams and chase him into a cold sweat. He hadn’t told his parents, but he was sure they suspected it with the way they glanced at the dark circles around his eyes in the morning. He still said nothing, because he didn’t want to trouble them any more than he already had for the past year.

A knock came from the door, following after a head peering in.

“Doing okay?” Greg’s dad asked.

Wirt nodded, putting his pencil down as his step father entered the room and sat on his bed. “Did Greg wear a scarf?”

“Yeah,” the man laughed in response, knowing how protective Wirt had become of his brother since they came home from the hospital. “I’m surprised you didn’t go out with him. He’s going to your friend Sara’s house, right?”

Wirt nodded again. His step father didn’t demand him to explain, but he gave him some leeway space to organize his thoughts, hoping that Wirt would at least prove to him that he didn’t have to panic and become an overbearingly loving father. Wirt, as appreciative as he felt, he maintained the casual wordlessness from his end.

“You know,” His step father said, “Sometimes we don’t know what makes us sad or angry or scared or even happy. There’s nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.”

Wirt almost said something, but clenched his fists instead. Maybe that was true, that not understanding why he felt a certain way shouldn't have mattered, but it still bothered him. It bothered him because he thought that he had to understand it to stop feeling that way. But that didn't always have to be true, did it? Like being afraid of the dentist when you were a kid, no one can quite explain that, but you became less afraid as you got older. Maybe Wirt should have spent less time thinking and worrying and _explaining_ to himself, because maybe that only made things worse. He smiled, “Thanks, John.”

"Well, I'll be here to talk whenever you want." Greg’s father smiled back sheepishly, rubbing his palms together and stood up quickly. “I made crème brûlée when I got home, and it should be ready in a couple of minutes. You should have yours before Greg gets home. You know how he hogs his sweets in his pants.”

Wirt actually chuckled despite himself. “Yeah, okay.” He agreed and waited until his step father left to turn back to the blank page on his table. After a few seconds of frowning at the page, he sat back in his chair and looked at the open door, a sweet smell floating in from the hallway.

Within a couple of minutes, Wirt was dashing down the stairs to the kitchen, page on his desk still blank.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I barely made it, wow.
> 
> Happy New Years everyone! See you all in 2015!
> 
> Anyways, read & review, or leave with a smile. It makes us better writers.


	6. Fanfic Announcement

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sometime yesterday, an unfortunate thing occured: my good old PC that I have been relying on to connect me to the internet for the last six years kicked the bucket. I have back-ups of documents as recent as last week, but unfortunately, the new chapter is gone and with frustration and shame, I have come to the disappointing conclusion that I will not be able to rewrite all that I had finished by the end of today (as well as other documents and papers that I could not retreive). 
> 
> HOWEVER, DO NOT FEAR! I am not going to call it quits! Expect two full chapters by next week brought to you by a new PC/laptop/whatever that I can get my hands on. I'm so sorry for the inconvenience, I know I've been quite inconsistant and, believe me, I'm rather annoyed with my work ethics and this whole situation is just icing on the cake. Thank you for your patience! Keep being the wonderful people you are!

The new chapters will be found here next week!

Edit: I'm just going to keep this here, but new chapters are uploaded!

Lots of warm hugs,

Nazca


	7. "The Spirit of Valiance"

“She can stay if she wants to,” Mary said. For the last few hours, Sara had been doing her utmost best to explain the strange circumstances surrounding their surprise houseguest. Despite her first impression, Mary was not as strict and cold as Beatrice had thought. In fact, she had defused in the matter of minutes and seemed quite carefree when Sara had asked if Beatrice could continue to stay. “I don’t own the house,” Marie said simply. “Not my rules that are bent.” By that point, Greg had arrived. His hair was covered with mud and twigs poked out from behind his ears. How he had gotten so dirty from a short walk, none of them knew nor asked. Sara silently dismissed herself from the room and got to work washing the grim out of the boy’s hair in the upper floor bathroom. Beatrice sat at the kitchen table for some minutes, playing with her fingers and picking at the dirt under her nails. She even spent some time restudying the patterns on the wall carpet in order to avoid eye contact with Sara’s sister.

It wasn’t so much that Mary made her uncomfortable, but she was a stranger compared to Sara. She had never felt so antsy around new people until she had awoken in Wirt’s world and the weird nervousness that made her gut clench was beginning to drive her nuts. Beatrice knew very little about Mary, but she did not need to know much to notice that the relationship between the sisters was an awkwardly strained one. Neither seemed to particularly despise the other, but there was also no affection, no playful bickering, no proper eye contact eve. There was an empty space between them, as though they were the two strangers and not Mary and Beatrice. The rift did not seem newly opened either. It reminded her too much of her own circumstances, and because of that it made her squirm internally. 

Mary was sipping apple juice out of a fancy wine glass, thin legs kicked up on the table and tall-heeled boots dangling off the edge. Fur decorated her neckline on a short coat and tight trousers on the bottom, a fashion that Sara had to explain to her before. (“It’s okay, women can wear pants.”) She looked tired, but there was a hard, undefeated look to her that resembled Sara’s more youthful version. “Beatrice,” she said slowly, “Was it?” Beatrice nodded, fingers frozen in place on her lap. Mary nodded back for a good measure. “Let’s cut to the chase: you ran away from home, and that’s okay by me. I’m not going to ask you questions; I’m not a private investigator. I want to ask you this though. Are you planning to cut your education too?”   

Beatrice blinked, caught off-guard. Sara had explained a very mulled-down version of Beatrice’s story without using the words “run away”, but if she thought about it, Beatrice had essentially run away from home. Even if she hadn’t made a deal with the Beast, she had still escaped her life. It sounded different when Mary said it, as though the decision had been purely selfish therefore sinful. Beatrice frowned, but honestly she was not sure how to feel about that because, in essence, it was a selfish reason that prompted her to leave.   

Beatrice found a plastic orange pen and pad of paper that said ‘Shopping List’. “I have not gone to school in a long time.”

Mary raised an eyebrow at that. “When?”

“When I was ~~ten~~ twelve?”

“When you were _twelve_?” Mary exclaimed, nearly laughing but immediately suppressing it. “You’re not shitting me, are you?”

“I don’t think so?” Beatrice did not question the older girl’s choice of words.

“You’re like, what? Nineteen?”

“Seventeen,” Beatrice corrected.

“Jesus,” Mary said, sipping the last of the apple juice and shaking the glass above her open lips.  “Well, you didn’t miss much. High school life isn’t that golden.”

Mary had dropped law school, but what that was, Beatrice had to guess. She had overheard Sara and Mary talking lightly about it, when it sounded like it matter much more than they both let on. Why Mary was so concerned with school all of a sudden, Beatrice couldn’t understand.  

Beatrice scribbled on the notepad. “Would you mind if I asked you something?”

“Shoot.” Mary motioned with a hand in a pistol shape.

“I’m not ready to go home, because I’m afraid of what they would say.” Beatrice wrote. “But I’m also afraid to step outside because I’m afraid of what I will find. Is that strange?”

Mary chewed on the rim of the glass, brows furrowing.

“You’re afraid of the world,” she said, shrugging. “No one ever said you can’t be.”

Beatrice stared at the shopping list pad. It was decorated with little salt and pepper shakers, falling cabbages and bright red strawberries. In the distance was a mill, fields of corn lining the pastures beside its strong but homely stature. “I wish I could stop.”

“Can’t you?” Mary smiled knowingly at her. “Has Sara told you about our perfect parents?”

Beatrice shook her head.

“Mm _hm_ ,” she hummed, stretching and tipping back her chair but somehow maintaining balance. “The neurosurgeon and the congressman. I’m sure that doesn’t mean jack to you, and to be honest, it doesn’t matter that much to me either—but to the people who run the world, it means _everything_. It means our parents can make all the green and live in this big fancy house but never actually _live_ in it. They can cruise past you on the street in a sports car, or publicly humiliate others and cover it all up instead of facing their mistakes. They can buy anything they want—they can buy their _kids_ anything they want, because that’s what they really do. They buy people by making a living off of people’s weaknesses. They buy their loyalty, their kindness, their patience…” She sighed a short, half-hearted sigh. Mary put the glass down and swung her legs off the table. “Am I afraid of the world?” She laughed. “You bet. It’s hard to live up to someone else’s standards. So I thought, maybe I shouldn’t. You should be scared, but you can’t let fear stop you.”

“If you’re done complaining about Mom and Dad’s success, could you put the dishes in the dishwasher?” Sara was standing in the doorway. Her shirt was stuck to her chest, hair slightly damp at the edges, and socks soaked. 

“What happened to you?” Mary blinked at her younger sister, looking her up and down.

“Greg’s like a cat,” she grinned painfully at Beatrice. “He hates water.” 

“Am not!” Greg yelled from the hallway.

“I’m going to bring him home,” Sara said. “It’s too dark out for him to walk alone.”

“‘’kay,” Mary gave her a thumbs up (another strange motion that Beatrice had come to learn quickly, along with the middle finger gesture).

Beatrice stood up in attempt to be polite and say goodbye to Greg. She went to the laundry room and found Greg’s jacket that had been cleaned by a white box called a washing machine, and its twin, the dryer.  She brought it over and helped him put it on when she accidentally grabbed his arm and he exclaimed in pain.

“I’m practicing my yodelling?” Greg laughed. 

She stared at him, unconvinced, and rolled up his sleeves as he protested. Beatrice wrote, “How did you get these bruises?”

Greg was silent for a moment. “I fell!”

No amount of falling could cause bruises in such strange places, but Beatrice did not comment on the evident lie. Instead, she helped him shrug on his coat without any further questions and buttoned him up. Sara on her own coat, sharing a look with Beatrice before the she and Greg slipped out the door. 

 

<oOo>

 

Wirt was not sure where he was. There was a bright light in his face that he could not walk past, so it continued to blind him of his surroundings. The second thing he noticed was a small hand in his. It was familiar in shape, softness and warmth, but he couldn’t speak to him. Something was stopping his voice from leaving his lips. The light began to dim, and as he started to regain sight, he began to realize his surroundings. He immediately looked down, hoping what he was seeing was not real and that the hand he was grasping was not Greg’s, but Greg was nowhere to be found. Wirt stood in a dark forest, completely alone. The hand he thought he had been holding was the branch of a short, grotesque-looking tree. He snatched his hand back in shock, noticing with alarm that he was wearing a blue cape and mismatched shoes. _No_ , he thought. _No, no no no._  

He looked up, the sky an eerily unnatural white and the trees, in contrast, inky black. A strong gust of wind and the sound of flapping wings caught his attention. When he looked up, there, on the thinnest, highest branch of the tree next to him perched a huge black crow. The bird was so large, Wirt swore it was about his height and there was no way it could not have broken the branches it sat on.  

“Oh,” the crow said in a familiar, feminine voice. “It’s _you_ again.”

The crow let out an ear-piercing caw and crackled with delight.

“Trying to get home?” She stretched her wings, a frightening span of thick, black feathers that could have ran the length of a car from body to feather tip. She seemed to laugh a sort of hybridized bird screech and human laugh, and suddenly fell from her perch. Wirt was petrified, unable to even close his eyes as the gigantic bird hurtled towards him. She changed momentum at the last second to a swoop and tried to snatch him up. Suddenly regaining his motor skills, Wirt ducked a second before the claws met his body and began to run. “I’ll take you to Adelaide!” She shrieked after him. Wirt ran until his lungs hurt, ducking around trees in zig-zag patterns and jumping over fallen logs but he couldn’t outrun the crow no matter how thick and dense the forest got. She was always close behind. 

“Make a wish,” the crow crackled. He felt her claws pierce through his cape and seize his shoulders, nails digging into his skin. He wanted to thrash, to yell, anything to stop the pain and fright. The more he flailed, the higher they went and the less he could move and the sharper the crow’s claws felt. _No, no, no, no._  

They flew over black trees and ghastly white grass until there, below him, was a burnt-black wooden house about the size of his thumb. The crow’s huge black beak felt like ice against his cheek, the bottom beak grazing his jaw bone and the top brushing against the hair by his temple. The beak opened slightly to whisper in his ear but the words themselves came from a shy, regretful voice somewhere deep inside the bird, as if there was someone trapped inside the crow. She didn’t sound menacing, or angry, or hurt. Just lonely.

“Goodbye, Wirt.” And then he was falling.

Wirt woke abruptly, his head pounding. He was on the floor, rolled up in the sheets and blankets like an insect cocoon. _Not real_ , Wirt chanted to himself, yanking his arms out of the tight wrap to wipe the sweat from his forehead. _It’s not real_. 

  

<oOo>

 

Dream or no dream, Wirt knew that if his subconscious was pushing him to face Beatrice by going so far as to create a demonic version of her in his head, then he was definitely dragging the matter for way too long. He resolved to talk to a mediator, Sara, because he hadn’t left her house on great terms with her either. Even though they didn’t have any classes together, Wirt knew that Sara spent a lot of time in the band rooms and talking to various cheerleaders and coaches about upcoming games. Knowing where she would be was easy, and avoiding her was even easier, but when it came down to it, Wirt was usually too indecisive to put this particular information into any good use until right then.   

“Where’s Sara?” Wirt decided that the band room was close enough for a good start. At lunch time, he was sure that she would have been hanging around with, if not Jason, at least her other friends like Samantha and Kennedy who were quite close with the marching band players. They usually had lunch rehearsals three days a week, which Wirt had very casually asked about a month before. (The idea of joining was still an undecided option. He was just taking his sweet time to think about it.) To his chagrin, everyone but Sara, including Jason, was sitting against the far wall of the band room. Wirt did not dislike any of Sara’s friends, other than Jason, but he was not particularly close to any of them either. They were glad he was alive when he woke up in the hospital, but like Sara, had gotten strange vibes from him soon after and tried to involve him in their group all at the wrong times and thus felt sort of distanced from him.   

When he approached them, they stared up at him in surprise. Samantha was the first to wave and make room for him in their circle on the floor. “It’s okay, I’m just need to talk to Sara.” Wirt said, hoping he was not getting their hopes up. The act of talking to them after all this time was awkward as it was.  

“S-still in the b-bathroom,” Jason said in his lumpy, pubescent voice. “W-want to leave h-her a m-message?”

Wirt wasn’t sure what about Jason set him off. He hadn’t verbally attacked him, nor had he socially shunned him either. In fact, Wirt had been the one to shut everyone out. He couldn’t remember what started it all, but his strong dislike for the boy had started before he even realized Jason had feelings for the same girl. After that, Wirt had started to dislike everything Jason did or said. He wore a tie to school everyday even though the strange half-bowl-cut-half-skater-boy hair clashed. (Who was he to judge fashion though?) Jason’s marks were, let’s face it, perfect and he got on well with all the teachers and all the students no matter what grade. Literally everything he did annoyed Wirt to the ends of the earth even though he had done absolutely nothing wrong to him personally. Knowing this, Wirt couldn’t help holding the same intense grudge he had been holding for nearly a year. _Why is he replying first?_ Wirt thought. _Why is no one else saying anything?_

“You’re not her voicemail,” Wirt muttered under his breath.

“W-what?” Jason asked, even after a year, still clearly oblivious to how much Wirt resented him.

“Nothing,” Wirt waved as he made for the door. “Forget it.”

Maybe it was his likeableness, the fact that he wasn’t visibly struggling the way Wirt was that made him so much more irritating. He couldn’t even hate him for cockiness because despite getting along with everyone in high school and achieving the highest marks in every class, Jason was humble and considerate, helpful even. He tutored for free at the library sometimes.

“Wirt,” a voice called out to him. “Wirt, I need to talk to you.”

Wirt was startled out of his thoughts, feeling a hand on his arm. Sara turned him around, looking out of breath. She must have had seen the back of his head from the end of the hall and sprinted around all the milling high schoolers to catch up.

“It’s about Greg,” she said. Wirt had been expecting her to say “Beatrice”, so the mere mention of his younger brother assaulted him with the near-forgotten dream he had forgotten from the night before. Wirt’s hands clenched in an unconscious attempt to squeeze the small hand that was not there. “He came over yesterday like he had walked through a tornado. I was washing all this crap out of his hair and he had all these scratches and bruises under his hair.” Sara said. “I think he’s being bullied.”

Wirt straightened, struck dumbfound. Bullied? Wirt thought. Greg? Even the simple notion of the two words being joined together in the same sentence was impossible. If Wirt was the high school dorky wallflower, then Greg was the elementary Jason Funderburker. Everyone loved him, it was hard not to (unless you were Wirt who had a tendency to hate perfect people.) Greg had hundreds of friends and was overly excited about everything, finding ridiculously optimistic reasons in the dark to celebrate about. Even after waking up in the hospital, Greg hadn’t changed, Wirt had. If anyone was to be bullied for the way they acted, or looked, it was Wirt—not Greg.

“He can be a little weird,” Wirt started to say. “But he’s not being _bullied_.”

Sara gave him a very stern look, as if wanting to shake him. Instead, she sighed. “I hope you’re right.” 

 _This is wrong_ , Wirt thought suddenly. He wasn’t sure why he got defensive, Sara was not one to say things for the mere attention. It was happening again, the bnt stubbornness that blinded him from hearing anyone else’s opinion or concern. That was the one thing that had not changed before and after the Unknown. He ignored Greg even when Greg had important, even life-saving, ideas. Sara said Greg was in trouble, and she wouldn’t lie for the fun of it.

“Thanks for telling me.” Wirt said before she turned to leave him standing alone in the hall. 

Sara stared at him for a moment, looking like she wanted to say more. “Hey,” she softened. “That’s what friends do, right?”

Wirt nodded awkwardly, feeling lighter. The ‘leaving on unhappy terms’ was a habit he had to kick sooner or later.

“Why don’t you sit with us for lunch?” Sara offered. She had her hands stuffed in her varsity jacket pockets, faded jeans and unkept hair that reminded him of ninth grade English all over again.  

“No, I’m…” Wirt started, palms starting to get clammy. It was a nostalgic feeling. The old him would have jumped at the chance, voice cracking, stutters, and everything. “Can I just ask… are you and Jason…?”

“What?” She frowned.

 _Wrong move_ , Wirt thought. “You know.”

Sara gave him a tired look, though she didn’t seem to be projecting her frustration specifically at him. She put her hands in her pockets and said, “I don’t know what he told you, but we’re not an item anymore.”

“Oh,” Wirt couldn’t find a better response. “Okay.”

“Okay?” She smiled a small smile at him.

“Yeah,” he managed a nervous grin. “Yeah, R-right, um, I have to go.”

Wirt turned and forced himself to cooly walk everything off, though his insides were twisting in embarrassed agony. As soon as he got to the staircase, he nearly jumped the flight of stairs. Though he felt like jumping in a hole and never climbing out ever again, a part of him welcomed it. He hadn’t felt this way for a long time, and the familiarity was comforting—that natural disaster-ness of it all. He was beginning to feel, maybe not normal, but like someone he wanted to become.  

As he rounded the corner, he remembered he hadn’t mentioned the main reason he needed to talk to Sara. _I guess she’ll find out when I come over,_ he thought. Passing the school’s main office, he caught sight of a tall black woman and a slightly shorter red-head by the administration desk. Someone was speaking loudly and very quickly while the office woman behind the desk was arguing back. 

He swore that from behind, the girl looked a lot like Beatrice, but how he knew, he wasn’t sure. He’d never seen her human form from the back, plus this girl had her hair in a ponytail. Though these weren’t very reliable facts of information, the bell rang, ending the lunch period and Wirt didn’t have more time to investigate further.

He must have been seeing things.

 

<oOo> 

 

On his way home, Wirt tried to remember if Greg had ever shown signs of distress or simply any proof that he was having a hard time at school. As far as he knew, no one had ever said anything about the kettle he refused to stop wearing on his head. The kettle fashion had started much earlier than their trip to the Unknown, so Wirt reasoned that the kettle was not a component to the equation. 

He soon found himself at the graveyard, his feet seeming to lead him there while he was deep in thought. The sound of shouting and laughter came from behind some gravestones, but there wasn’t much that Wirt could see. _Probably a dumb fight_ , Wirt thought nonchalantly. _Ignore, ignore, ignore._

Suddenly, someone pushed him out of the way. If he hadn’t grabbed the railing of the fence, Wirt would have fallen back on the pavement.  
“Jeez,” he muttered, “What is your pro—”

The person who had shoved him was wearing a blue hoodie, and as the stranger ran past, the hood fell and he recognized the ginger pony-tailed girl as the same one he had seen in the office earlier that day. She was headed to the graveyard, probably towards the fight. Wirt was curious now, though he didn’t want to be involved, he wondered if this was something worth alerting to the police. He would have to evaluate it. Running after the redhead, he looked through the gaps in the gated fence where the fight was out in the open. The fights seemed to consist of a bunch of elementary school kids, probably no older than eleven or twelve, all grouped around a small figure in the middle of their circle. The kid looked up, his face becoming recognizable and Wirt’s felt the blood drain from his face. 

“Greg!” Wirt shouted, heart racing as he sprinted after the redheaded stranger. She was running so fast that she didn’t stop to go around the grave stones like he had to. She leapt over them like they weren’t a meter or so high but speed-bumps on a street trying to enforce a speed limit. She was running straight towards the skirmish, kicking up the dirt in sneakers that looked too big for her and in jeans that were too tight.     

There was an obvious leader. He stood in the far back, had a shock of blond hair and was slightly taller than all of them. Unlike the stereotypical bully situations that Wirt had always assumed was true, the leader of the pack did not look like he was capable of being mean. He had one of those faces that begged to play the part of Gabriel in a Nativity play at Christmas, or the face of a kid who went door to door asking for canned food donations at Halloween instead of candy and enjoyed it. 

One kid, a short but wide in stature, kicked Greg and the leader grumbled something. The kid kept kicking, and with each kick, the more Wirt’s blood boiled. His legs pumped, his fists clenching so hard they were chalky white. The group of sixth graders laughed as Greg laid motionless on the ground. “Get up,” they chanted. “Get up!”  

The redhead reached them first. She shoved through the ring and grabbed the kicking kid by the collar and flung him to the side. The entire group stopped laughing. 

“What the hell—“ The leader said. 

The redhead punched him square in the face.

Children screamed, and as wrong as punching an elementary-school kid looked, Wirt could only feel the flood of relief in his chest as she continued to hold of the mobs of shocked and angry kids. The leader clutched his nose, and when he pulled his hands away, a splatter of blood came away with them. Wirt scooped his brother into his arms, all thoughts dissipating at the alien, sorry state of Greg that Wirt had never seen before. There was a swollen lump around his ankle, and with his sweaty-damp hair without his kettle to hide it, Wirt saw what Sara had described to him: bloody scratches and dark purple bruises on his scalp everywhere where he parted the damp hair. 

“Fuck,” Wirt said, feeling angry and guilty and like punching a kid and like crying all at once. 

“Don’t say bad words in front of me,” Greg mumbled, snot dribbling out his nose. 

“I’m bringing you home, okay?” Wirt said, frantically shaking his backpack off and coaxing Greg on his back instead. _How could I have let this happen?_  

Despite there being two high schoolers in their midst, the elementary schoolers didn’t back off right away. As soon as the redhead had shaken a couple off her arms as they tried to pin her down and landed another punch at their leader, the gremlins began to get the message. They escaped the graveyard, falling over each other and shouting profanity that most of them did not actually understand. When the redhead was finished scaring off the last of them, she came over and picked up Wirt’s fallen bag.     

Why he wasn’t surprised that it was Beatrice, he couldn’t explain. Maybe it had been their experience together, walking through the strange woods of the Unknown on a journey to find their way home, to their families, and the three of them being together through thick and thin felt _right_. It felt like they had done it a million times before, and would face everything together after too. It felt natural for Beatrice to be there, as a bird or as a human, though he had expected her to run in the opposite direction rather than face the danger head on. Usually it took some convincing. 

Beatrice didn’t have her writing pad with her. In fact, she looked a little underdressed for the weather, as if she had dropped everything she’d been doing and ran to the graveyard. She held the backpack in her hand, looking confused at the arm straps and just slung it over her back like all the cartoon depictions of Santa and his bag of toys.

She nodded at him as if to say, _Let’s go_.

 _We’re three pilgrims, I guess_. He led them out of the graveyard in the direction of his and Greg’s house.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all! I've decided to cheat a bit and put the two chapter update in one... because they have such similar themes. (I'm sorry for those of you who had your heart set on seeing the +2 chapter bump in the chapter counter. I'm terrible at titles, so coming up with titles for each chapter is really stressful for me to begin with :s) 
> 
> My computer situation has been resolved, so thank you for your patience! I'll have to re-install a lot of programs (like drawing programs for instance) to get back to my goal of chapter pictures, but for now, enjoy the essence of written storytelling. 
> 
> Read & review or leave with a smile, it makes us better writers! :)


	8. "A Knight in Shrouded Armour"

Beatrice had grown antsy inside the house by the time she had hit the one week marker. She felt trapped, even though she knew she was not being kept against her will and she could have left at any point, even a brief walk around the neighbourhood. Though, of course, Sara showed concern about this and advised her to have a guide whenever she needed to leave the house. Beatrice never took her up on her offer. The truth was, Beatrice feared the new world. At first, she had basked in the splendour of mechanics that made human life so much easier, but then she encountered horse-less carriages, and computers, and Global Warming. She had become less interested in escaping, and more in defending herself from such elements. 

She had found a history book in the library room of Sara’s home and spent time reading through the many eras, feeling an odd sense of knowing and familiarity. Perhaps the world she had come from and the world she was in now were not so different—or maybe they were one and the same. _Then what does that make me?_ Beatrice thought. She put it down. She treated her newly-found realization and the knowledge from the book like entertainment, something to muse about when she was bored, something that she preferred to think was imaginative rather than be frightened by how possible it was.

Mary had been the one to push Beatrice out of the house and dragged her along into an automobile to register her for school. Her first experience in a car was curious, and not entirely pleasant. The seatbelt in particular made her feel like she was being strapped like an asylum patient, but Mary was amused by the way she played with the window switch. Mary did not, however, endorse her exploration of the radio and punching the many buttons on the dashboard, telling her not to “fuck anything up” because her “insurance won’t cover it.” This meant little to nothing to Beatrice, but she settled with just staring out the window at how incredibly quickly the trees and buildings went by. 

“What’s that?” 

“I can’t read while I’m driving, Bee.” They stopped at a crossroads (which Mary called an “intersection”) and Mary glanced over at Beatrice’s notepad. “What?”

Beatrice gestured towards the fun-coloured building with a huge yellow ‘M’ on a pedestal by the road.

“Oh,” Mary laughed. “That’s a MacDonald’s. We can stop by after this, maybe they’ll let you into the kids’ room with all the tubes and slides.” 

“Are you insinuating that I am a child?”

The car began to move again, and the building flew past. Beatrice leaned her body towards the window, sticking her head outside. The wind hurt her cheeks and her eyes watered a little, but the experience of being able to feel speed, in and out of itself, was exhilarating. She squinted at the world that passed her in a blur, and immediately noticed a familiar building in the distance.  

“What are you, a dog?” Mary pulled her by the bottom of her borrowed hoodie back into the car. Beatrice, undaunted, grabbed for her notebook and scribbled as quickly as she could. When Mary ignored the page, Beatrice shoved it in front of her vision and the whole car veered the the side. “MOTHER OF— _fucking hell_ —don’t do that!”

They arrived at another intersection when Mary finally took a look at her notepad, but by then, Beatrice had noted they had driven by a whole three more MacDonald’s buildings. 

“Yeah, there’s a bunch everywhere.” Mary shrugged. “Consumerism at its best.”

Inquisitive, and having no clue what Mary meant, Beatrice wrote, “how many are there?” 

“Per block?” Mary asked.

 _Per block?_ Beatrice thought with alarm.

“Just wait until you count all the Starbucks we have in this town.” Mary chuckled, the light turned green, and they sped away before Beatrice could reply with a new question.

When Sara had told her Beatrice was not registered as existing in any system, Mary found the means to create an identity for Beatrice: forging a birth certificate, a SIN card, a new surname, even a fake backstory. How she managed to do this, no one dared to ask. Mary kept it to herself and seemed very mysterious about it all. 

The first thing Beatrice noticed was how she had never been to a school as massive as this one. Mary spoke to the administration, arguing about things that was gibberish to her (like watching animals bark and chirp to each other), but it looked as though Mary had full confidence of her case so Beatrice stood without interrupting them. When they were finished, Mary left the building in a huff. She had signed several papers and spoken to all sorts of different people dressed in stiff suits (even the women). By the time they were done, the students themselves were going home. Beatrice followed her back to the car, unsure if talking to Mary would be an okay move or if it would further aggravate her. 

“What’s the matter?” Beatrice wrote when they were in the parking lot.

“The matter is the school principal is an asshole,” Mary grumbled. “You’re mute, not on life support.”  She got into the car and slammed the door. Beatrice was about to do the same when a strange sensation came over her. “ ‘She should have an interpreter.’ Interpreter, my ass. Someone’ll learn sign language if they want to, not if someone else tells them to.”

“Do you hear something?” Beatrice wrote and looked over her shoulder at the hordes of adolescents leaving the school. It was a strange sight, considering that she had never seen so many young people all in one place, let alone still going to school. It seemed so long ago that her own mother had been ready to plan Beatrice’s wedding. In the midst of far-away chatter, someone was screaming her name. It was a voice she knew but couldn’t quite place. A gust of wind pushed past her hair and in an unknown, but very specific direction. 

“Hear what?” 

“I need to go,” Beatrice scribbled. She threw the notebook into the car and ran, Mary’s startled shouts calling after her. She let the wind guide her, which seemed like a very whimsical and ridiculous decision, but ever since she was a bird, she had learned to trust forces of nature as they often knew more than one thought.   

 

<oOo>

 

Wirt had made a point, after the whole incident, to walk Greg to and from school to be absolutely sure that nothing of the sort would ever happen again. The attackers stood at a distance like vultures waiting for prey to weaken to the point of defencelessness, and Wirt could see them. Did they know he could see them? Were they doing it on purpose? What had Greg done to make them attack him? Wirt shook that thought from his mind. Why did he think Greg was at fault? Why did he _always_ think Greg was at fault? It was a hard habit to shake. 

The impossible had happened, and Wirt blamed himself even though it was not within his control. He had assumed that because Greg was a sweet kid, no one would have the heart to be bothered by his strange uniqueness, especially after coming from the hospital. He had forgotten how cruel some people were, how heartless they were and how intolerant. Just because good people existed, it didn't mean that the bad people were out of the picture. They always existed and would continue to exist. To forget them was a grave mistake. If Beatrice had not been there to take action, Wirt was not sure what he would have done. He wouldn’t have punched children or broken noses, but maybe he would have done something worse. Maybe he would have walked away, completely uninterested in finding out who was involved in the fight.  

While Wirt was on the verge of worry, becoming an annoyance of an older brother by being overbearingly overprotective, Greg had very little to say. In fact, he had little change in attitude. He was still peculiarly loveable, optimistic, idealistic, and utterly simple. He thought little of what had happened, didn’t cry when their mother cleaned and bandaged up his scratched palms, elbows, and knees, and was very calm when he spoke to his father about the people who had hurt him. Even when asked by his parents and the school if they should have pressed further punishment on the older children, Greg was against it. Of all the things Greg could have chosen to feel angry about, he chose the most unlikely. 

“Why aren’t you ghost hunting with me anymore?”

Wirt could see them from the hill, the blond leader at the front with a large bandage of gauze in the centre of his face. Did they really think they could frighten him?  

“Why?” Greg repeated. 

“What?” Wirt asked, eyes still trained on the hill as they walked away from Greg’s elementary school. 

“Ghost hunting and ghost whispering—why did you stop?”

Wirt let his gaze fall into Greg. His eye was bruised up, a patch of greenish skin just under his hairline. 

“Wait, are you mad at _me_?”

Greg blew a raspberry and walked ahead, his small stature looking ever smaller from behind. Wirt did not need to struggle to catch up. His joints had been aching a little as a side effect of hitting a growth spurt, and his legs were able to cover more ground faster. 

“We need to capture all the ghosts in town,” Greg said. “And help people and stuff like when we were in the Unknown or else they’ll haunt the town forever!”

“That’s not how it works, Greg.” Wirt stopped himself from rolling his eyes. 

Greg stopped in his tracks. “Why not?”

Wirt, forced to stop as well, wasn’t sure what prompted him to say what he did. He knew the importance of routine, the importance of keeping a schedule of habits running so that the awful, anxious feeling would be kept at bay. Just because Greg did not show it the way Wirt did, or suffer from it as much as Wirt, didn’t mean Greg did not suffer at all. Ghost hunting, ghost whispering—they were just regular circulations of activities to keep Greg distracted, and though they did not make sense to anyone, it made sense of Greg and that was all that mattered.  

But he was tired. Wirt was tired of playing pretend, with going along with Greg’s antics. He was tired with his own routines, his own pretend games—sometimes he couldn’t handle both at once. “Because there’s no such thing as ghosts,” Wirt tried to explain. “O-or supernatural…mumbo jumbo.”

Greg, hardly the kind of person to get angry or swayed with troubling thoughts, suddenly sounded very doubtful. “Yeah there are. What about Adelaide? Or the schoolhouse animals? Or Auntie Whispers and Lorna?”

The mention of their names set Wirt into a defensive mode. “That’s not real life.” 

“It _is_ real life.” Greg said, equally defensive. “It’s a rock fact.”

“Stop!” Wirt cringed. “Stop—just… stop. We’re not going back to the Unknown. Ever.”

Greg stared at his older brother, eyes large and colour draining from his face. He asked very quietly, almost whispering, “What do you mean?”

“Y-you need to stop running away from your problems, Greg!” Wirt sputtered desperately. “You think the Unknown is real, but this is too!” He grabbed Greg’s wrist and showed him his bandaged palms. Greg’s hands were so small in his, so fragile. “Your problems here are real, and you can’t pretend that going back to the Unknown is going to fix them!”  

“I never said…” Greg choked.

“But you think it.”

Greg shook his head, disbelieving what Wirt had just told him. His eyes said everything, asked him all the questions Wirt didn’t even have the courage to ask himself. They told Wirt that he had betrayed Greg. His brother ran.  

Wirt didn’t want to stop him, but seeing his silhouette in the distance made Wirt’s throat clench, an unswallowable lump. There was no mistake where Greg was going. He was running to the one place Wirt did not want to go to—the one place he would be afraid to return to because it promised confrontation. 

But if Greg thought he wouldn’t go right then, he was wrong. Wirt was tired of routine, of schedule, of playing pretend. He was afraid of his nightmares, and hospitals, stone walls and graveyards. He hated fights, doing wrongs, and facing his fears, but he’d be damned if he let fear become more important than his brother. So he ran after him.

 

<oOo> 

 

Beatrice was surprised when she opened the door. When Greg had appeared, she thought nothing of it, but to see Wirt there not five minutes afterwards—well, she had not expected him. The last time so many of them had been together was when she was in bed and unable to move. 

Wirt immediately noticed she was wearing clothing that seemed to fit her better, including a thick, yellow infinity scarf around her neck that hid the white slash of a scar. When she had come to Greg’s rescue, they hardly had any time to notice the other, and even less time to talk. They had been too concerned with Greg’s physical state, which seemed to be the most important priority. Seeing each other now after all they had endured that day was not necessarily bitter as it had been before, but it was, nonetheless, awkward.

Greg had barricaded himself in a room and refused to come out. Sara left the two in the living room as she must have noticed the tension and thought to act as a third party and coax Greg out of his solitude, as when Wirt tried, Greg had ignored him. 

Beatrice sat on a black couch directly in front of him while he sat in another.

“What’s going on with you and Greg?” Beatrice slide the notebook towards him. He looked up and saw that she was staring at the coffee table, eyelashes blonde under the dim ceiling light.

Beatrice was embarrassed as it was. She was not sure how to approach him, how to ask if he was okay or how to ask if he needed help—if he _wanted_ help.

“Even when I try I end up being a terrible brother.” Wirt said. 

“That’s true,” Beatrice wrote, in spite of herself. She thought better of it and grabbed the notebook to change her reply, but Wirt had already seen it.

Wirt scoffed, “That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

She rolled her eyes and smiled. 

“Everything I said to him,” Wirt swallowed, but the lump was ever-present. “I’m-I’m a hypocrite.” _Breathe_ , he thought to himself, binding rapidly. “He has this—this _notion_ that we’re going back to the Unknown when he’s checked all the things off an imaginary To-Do list. I-I told him that he’s just running away from bullies, and responsibilities, and real life but…” Beatrice looked up at him, his head was the one that was bowed this time. He said softly, “but I was talking about myself.”

Beatrice grabbed for the notepad, scribbling her thoughts down as quickly as she could, as if afraid that thinking would render her courage useless. “That’s not true,” she pushed the notepad across the table. “You’re here.”

Wirt stared at the paper. When he did not respond, Beatrice slid the page back to her end of the table.

“Greg knows you try, I think that’s what counts,” Beatrice wrote on the page. “He worships you, did you ever notice that?”

Wirt nodded. He admitted, “I’ve always wished he wouldn’t. I don’t want to do the wrong things anymore.”

“He’ll forgive you,” Beatrice reached forward and touched the tips of her fingers on his knuckles. His skin was cold under her touch, which only made her want to reach out and hold his hand, to banish the cold away, but she didn’t. “I’m going to be here for a while, if that’s all right,” Beatrice wrote, not looking at him even after she moved her hand away. He hoped she didn’t notice the ghost of a reflex of his hand, a slight move to hold on to the warmth.

“I'm glad you’re here,” he blurted. And he meant it. 

She decided to chance a glance, because all the avoidance and dancing around and neglect was eating her insides hollow. He was smiling at her, partly sheepishly, partly a nervous wreck. He was breathtakingly, almost torturously genuine. All the hiding, the tense caution that griped her chest ebbed away. It hurt her to see him smile at her like that, like when they had last said their goodbyes so long ago. It hurt in a good way though—like a pinch to make sure one was not dreaming. She pinched herself then, and winced. She laughed a little, which sounded like she was coughing, but Wirt did not mind. He didn’t ask her any question, didn’t voice any alarm because he didn’t feel alarmed. He hadn’t felt relaxed in a long time. Sure, he was afraid that somehow this moment wouldn’t last. He was afraid that one wrong move and everything that he had made solid and good would break apart and she would only have been a hallucination,  but it didn’t feel likely. Right then, it didn’t matter what or why or when or how—Beatrice was here, and she was laughing. He laughed with her. The large, empty room was filled to the brim with their mirth—until their chests were light and cheeks were warm and the sun had turned to dusk and slipped off the curvature of the sky into the duvet of night.

And they were okay with that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some sad stuff, some happy stuff. Wirt/Beatrice melodrama is going to really tone down after this. 
> 
> Hey all! So I've decided to take a small break, so next chapter will be up most likely on February 4th! I'm planning to switch majors (and universities) so I need to prepare my portfolio and it's going to take a lot of my time. I'm really sorry! Please know that I'll be regularly updating after this brief period is over, you're all the best!
> 
> Read & review, or leave with a smile. It makes us better writers.


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